the end of protestA new playbook for revolution

Interviews on THE END OF PROTEST by Micah White

Is protest broken? Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, thinks so. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history. Yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Now activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance.

The most provocative book I’ve read this year is The End Of Protest, by Micah White, one of the two initiators of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Remember Occupy? Those crazy days when, giddy with the apparent success of the previous year’sArab Spring, independent, decentralized groups of protestors, connected by cell phones and social media, seized public spaces across America and…

…nothing, really. In the end Occupy was a complete failure which accomplished nothing. To White’s credit, he writes with brutal frankness about this, and, more generally, about how political protest as we know it — marches, speeches, slogans, “clicktivism” — has been completely ineffective for decades, and is growing even less so with every passing year.

White does raise the interesting notion, though, of a new form of protest; one with an actually meaningful “theory of change”; an inchoate spectre that could haunt, chill, and even overthrow Establishment capitalism as we know it. A timely subject, in this election and Brexit year.

Will robots eat the jobs? Maybe. Sure isn’t happening yet. But, to quote Bradford DeLong, the rise of AI and automation “is qualitatively different from previous episodes of technological change. Will it have different consequences…? How can anyone know yet?”

But there is another conversation happening in the valley today. Its premise is that, when it comes to populist revolt, we may have seen nothing yet … If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.

I’ve argued that myself, in the past, but the lack of any actual evidence of automation-driven net job destruction now gives me pause. It may be a moot point, though. The question of whether robots will eat all the jobs is orthogonal to the question of whether people believerobots will eat all the jobs — and whether the tech industry will be viewed as the oppressors of the masses.

“I really think the pitchforks and torches are coming for us in tech,” mused a member of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley 100” to me over dinner a couple of months ago. (To his credit he’d be the first to roll his eyes at the existence of such an appellation.) I’ve certainly noticed, during my five years living in the Bay Area, a distinct rise in the use of “techie” as an epithet.

My point being: it seems reasonable to expect the rise of new protests, and new kinds of protests, aimed not just at political institutions à la Occupy; not just at injustices à la Black Lives Matter and the current pipeline protests in North Dakota; but aimed directly at the tech industry. We’ve seen some of that before, with stones thrown at Google buses, but that was really more about housing than tech. I’m talking about protestors who believe that the tech industry is a greedy, exploitative, and increasingly powerful behemoth which uses its power to reify rather than repair existing social inequalities and injustices.

Certainly the Occupy people think the perpetuation of unfair advantages is capitalism’s fault, not technology‘s, but, er, the distinction between “capitalism” and “the tech industry” grows pretty fine in an era in which the world’s five most valuable public companies are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — the same five tech titans that Bruce Sterling singled out as “the Stacks” some years ago.

The End Of Protest, after putting Occupy in (fascinating) historical context, identifies the reason that protests fail as a kind of entitled naivete — the bizarre belief that if you get a million people out onto the street demonstrating, then governments will have to respect that and change course, because it clearly represents the will of the people.

Interestingly, a lot of what White says about protests and revolution is what tech VCs say about startup. That the real secret to success is timing: every so often, the zeitgeist will sweep you along on its tidal wave (which is actually what happened to Occupy, which quickly grew beyond its wildest initial dreams — and yet still failed.) That “the best methods of protest are unrecognized because they defy our expectations of what a protest should look like,” which echoes VCs’ lament that many of the best ideas sound crazy at first. That “if we innovate, we win.”

This review was written by Jon Evans and originally appeared in TechCrunch

(I would remiss not to note that White also writes at length about spiritual paths and spiritual process; this being anything but my area of expertise, I’m going to refrain from commenting on that.)

There will be a certain dramatic irony if the tech industry finds itself facing protestors who adopt the very meta-algorithms of the modern tech industry: ignore history, try many different ideas even if they sound crazy, fail fast and pivot, scale sideways, accept that timing dictates success, etcetera. (Shades of the notion of left-wing accelerationism.) I think that such a future is likely, though, in the light of the heightening awareness, or at least perception, of inequalities and injustices today — and the ever more prominent role of the tech industry.

Beginning in September 2011, Micah White and fellow Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn sparked one of the largest protests in modern history: Occupy Wall Street. But today White describes the global movement as little more than a learning experience.

“What it taught us is our theories of social change that underpin contemporary activism are not true,” White said in a telephone interview. “Activists are now faced with coming up with new theories of social change, new tactics, and new ways of trying to effect social change.”

In his new book The End of Protest, White argues that, more than an isolated mistake, the Occupy movement signals a failure of tactics, objectives, and beliefs. What’s required now is a total rethink of activism in the 21st century, he suggests.

The Occupy movement may have given birth to something beautiful in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and hundreds of copycat encampments around the world, White continued, but those isolated pockets where change began were also where it ended.

“Now we are realizing, ‘No, actually, sovereignty can only be achieved through winning wars and winning elections.’ And so social movements need to figure out how to win elections, because I don’t think the war route is very productive.”

The next step is the subject of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, which spends more time on the future than it does reflecting on Occupy and the past. It’s also the question White plans to discuss next Wednesday (April 13) as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Incite series.

In hindsight, White writes in the book, Occupy’s failure was foretold.

“The anti–Iraq War movement collapsed after its global march on February 15, 2003, the largest synchronized protest in human history, failed to sway President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to halt the pre-emptive war on Iraq,” it reads. “Activists in 2003 believed that if millions of people around the world said no in unison on a single day, war would be impossible. Like Occupy, the anti-war movement vaporized when the theory of social change underlying the movement—that governments will bend if millions of people assemble in the streets, march and make a single demand—was proven ineffective.”

Street protests have become ineffective because they are so predictable, White explained. They are calculated into a government’s decision-making process, with police resources deployed accordingly.

Where does that leave activism? With far-reaching knowledge of protest theory and history, White has specific and tangible ideas.

In Spain, for example, he’s observed a conscious shift where groups that once boycotted elections now field candidates.

“They are building a social movement called Podemos that is winning elections,” he said. “They are starting to become the people in power….When we think, concretely, ‘What is the future of social protest?’, it is precisely that; it is to build social movements that can win political power, that can swing elections.”

What might that look like in North America? What advice would White offer to, for example, a group trying to end police violence against a visible minority?

“I would build a social movement specifically around ousting the person who is currently in charge of appointing the police commissioner or police chief,” he said. “And then I would appoint someone else. Basically, I would become the police.”

A founding member of the Black Lives Matter movement appears to be doing just that. On February 3, DeRay Mckesson declared he was running to become the mayor of Baltimore. “I have come to realize that the traditional pathway to politics, and the traditional politicians who follow these well-worn paths, will not lead us to the transformational change our city needs,” he wrote in a blog post announcing his campaign. “We must challenge the practices that have not and will not lead to transformation.”

Where else might we see this next manifestation of protest hit? What unrest does White see on the horizon?

“I think women are the most oppressed class in the world,” he replied. “We are going to wake up, we are going to look outside one day, and we are going to see women of all ages protesting. Protesting in ways that surprise us, just like the Occupy movement surprised us. And then we are going to see this movement spread globally in a tremendously quick way.”

White encouraged activists to learn from his mistakes.

“It is time for protesters to realize that we can both topple governments and we can become governments,” he said.

Micah White will appear with fellow authors Andrew Nikiforuk and Carrie Saxifrage in the Alice McKay Room of the Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch, next Wednesday (April 13), as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest's Incite series.

Occupy's Micah White calls for new vision of social activism with 'The End of Protest'

It was a global movement that started with a single email. In 2011, the British Columbia-based magazine Adbusters sent out a striking poster to thousands of its followers. It was a ballerina, poised on a sculpture of a bull that sits in New York's financial district. The text read: "Occupy Wall Street, September 17. Bring tent."

Micah White was the driving force behind that first idea, which eventually saw thousands of people camped out in cities worldwide, demanding change.

In this Oct. 5, 2011 file photo, a coalition of students and supporters from New York University and The New School march towards Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in New York, where hundreds camped in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest. Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine audaciously called for 20,000 "redeemers, rebels and radicals" to flood lower Manhattan and occupy Wall Street. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)

Now, White's new book The End of Protest presents an even more radical vision. He challenges ways activists have pushed for change for generations, offering the provocative idea that the current strategy of protesters massing on the street and issuing demands of politicians, simply no longer works. He even takes to task the Occupy movement, which he helped create, for no longer being relevant.

White joined As It Happens host Carol Off in studio to discuss the future of protest and what he calls a new "playbook" for social activism. Here is part of their conversation.

Micah White: I'm not disillusioned, absolutely not. On the contrary, I think that the end of protest is part of the natural cycle of social change and that we break out of it. I think that Occupy Wall Street was an example of us breaking out a period of sustained end of protest. I think that instead, I'm trying to hasten the breakout of the end of protest, by kind of naming it and pointing to it and saying "Hey, we're in a period where protest is ineffective, it's not going to be like that forever but it could be like that for a long time and we need to get out of this as quickly as possible," which is why I wrote a book about innovating new tactics of protest to break out of that.

Carol Off: To some extent, is this book almost subversive? Are you trying to stir people? To get them to rethink activism as you have in the past, when you have told them that you have to be spurred into action. Are you trying to spur people into action with this book?

Micah White: I absolutely am trying to spur people because I believe that what's fundamentally going on within activism is a kind of laziness at the conceptual level about our theories of social change. I think people have become very lazy in thinking that, "Well, I disrupted, I blocked some streets. I got a few thousand people, maybe even a million to go into the streets. I must be victorious." No, no I think it's really important that we become more sophisticated. I think that one of the reasons why I wrote my book is so that activists will read it and they'll become much more sophisticated in their way of thinking about activism and protest so that the next time a social movement that spreads to 82 countries comes along we will have a much more sophisticated and complex base of activists who can pull off something even bigger.

The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 spread almost overnight from a New York park to more than 80 other countries. It was a brief, shining moment of protest, familiar to those who grew up in the 1960s and '70s and lived through demonstrations about the Vietnam War, government corruption, the establishment. One of the people who inspired Occupy and its message of concern about the corporate funding of political parties is Micah White. White has written The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution.

It explains his understanding of social movements and his suggestions for future activists. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Jennifer: You say at the beginning of your book that the Occupy movement failed. Really?

Micah: Yeah, I think I am trying to resist the common narrative. There is this story we tell ourselves as activists, which is that nothing is a defeat. It is an enlightening, beautiful story. But that story stops us from understanding why we didn't actually achieve our objectives. Why didn't our encampment solve what it meant to solve: getting money out of politics? For me, when we celebrate our failures as success, we hold ourselves back from understanding how they failed. We failed because we didn't achieve what we set out to do, that is, to get money out of politics. But we achieved a lot of other things. That's why I call it a constructive failure.

Jennifer: I don't think you failed. You changed the way the world is now thinking about economics and work. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were listening to you. Was it a failure because it didn't incite a social revolution?

Micah: In Hillary's emails, there is information about Occupy. Someone went down to Zuccotti Park and asked to get a poster for her. So clearly they are assimilating our language.

But it is important - and I think this is hard for people to understand - you shouldn't confuse the head with the tail. Occupy Wall Street was the head and all of these other things are symptoms; they are the tails.

Obviously, Occupy had effects and consequences. It raised awareness around this issue, but those are just symptoms of our creation of a mass movement.

Take the example of Black Lives Matter: yes, it has raised the issue of black men being shot by police, but nothing has changed really. Black men are still being shot. If you start celebrating the awareness, you lose perspective about the deeper questions.

We made an effort to get money out of politics and it didn't happen. I am not saying Occupy had no positive consequences. It buoyed a lot of social protesters. It made activism cool again. It brought certain arguments to the fore.

Jennifer: There is a tidal wave of change in the way people, after Occupy, think about the economy. You say Occupy didn't create a revolution. What did you really want?

Micah: A revolution, I argue, is a change of legal regime and Occupy Wall Street was trying to change how corporations and unions give money to political candidates. When you create a social movement, your goal is not to raise awareness. Raising awareness is merely a symptom of the fact that you've created a social movement.

Are we content in creating movements that make the powerful stay in place and let the establishment use our language? Or are we trying to say, no, we want the people themselves in power.

Jennifer: Donald Trump is essentially leading a revolution. The core group supporting him is made up of disaffected, unemployed men who feel they have been deserted by the federal and state governments.

Micah: The left shouldn't just assume they are going to be the best at creating mass movements.

There is a yearning to be part of a collective. Part of what was beautiful about Occupy is that you would go to these assemblies, you'd be immersed in the collective, everyone would be chanting in unison. It was a beautiful, spiritual experience.

Jennifer: Your book was supported and published by Canadians, even though you are American. Could it have been published in the States?

Micah: No. We tried to find an American publisher but we got an insane number of rejections and the rejections all said the same thing: This book is fascinating, it is well written, it is important, but there is no market for it.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world were involved with Occupy. The American publishers were just worried about the saleability of the book.

What publishers didn't understand was that people are very hungry for critical thinking and a perspective on activism, both spiritually and philosophically.

Jennifer: Revolutions can be good and bad. Jesus was a protest leader. Protests against the war in Vietnam helped push Lyndon Johnson out of the White House. But look at the Bolsheviks, the French Jacobins in the 18th century, the Nazis who both started as street parties, and Mao, too.

Micah: Yes, but we can't continue to blindly follow the contemporary paradigm of activism, which is to get people into the streets. We saw that experience in World War II by Nazi Germany to give people a sense of collectiveness. Protest is a form of warfare and a kind of weapon. Ultimately I am optimistic that social movements will be more democratic than they are totalitarian. We have to create social change and Occupy didn't work because it wasn't able to get money out of politics. Even though Bernie Sanders is spouting ideas that sound very much like the Occupy party line, you have to understand that what was revolutionary in 2011 may not seem revolutionary the next year.

In my book, I am trying to offer new tactics for social change.

The core idea would be to build social movements to win elections and govern cities and carry out a social agenda. There is a model like that developing in Europe. The first model is Internet-enabled social movements that are able to develop complex decision making to create platforms and agree on laws. There is an emergence of new tactics.

We have become good at creating globally synchronized events. If you look at all the elections in the world and put them in chronological order, you can then imagine a social movement that can arise quickly and swing the election and then go to another country and swing the election there. So you go around the globe and try to win elections in each country.

Ideas from the edges of politics are the ones that suddenly inspire people and take off.

Jennifer: Revolutions have long-lasting results.

Micah: Some people say it takes three generations for a revolution to be truly complete. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The generation which commences a revolution rarely completes it."

Occupy changed my life forever. It changed other people's lives forever. But what I am trying to get across is that we can do bigger and better. People didn't think we could do something as big as Occupy, but I think we can do something bigger than Occupy. It requires a reassessment of our theories of social change and broadening our horizon of revolutionary possibility.

Humans do not all live equal lives; history shows this and all sensible philosophers concede this truth. There are strong ones among us: smart, rich, powerful, cunning.

The rest, the strong considers weak, and it seems a given that most injustices perpetrated flow from the “strong” to those they consider “weak”: religious intolerance, tribal and ethnic violence, “casual” sexism, economic instability, Jim Crow. There is also within all humans a sense of justice, that we are all of us entitled to freedom, the realization of our true selves, and possibly, transcendence. It is in valuing these rights that the oppressed lash out at their oppressors. One of the more readily available and viable forms of righting societal wrongs is protest. From the protests of the citizens of Uruk against Gilgamesh’s despotism to the Protestant Reformation to the French Revolution to the British abolition of slavery, the most important injustices have been met with the cries of the oppressed and the will to act against the powers that be.

Consider this: More than half the nations on the face of the earth were birthed out of protest movements; over eighty percent of sub-Saharan Africa was, as were the U.S. and Scotland. Slaves against masters, vassal states against suzerains, the weak wrestle against the strong and break their yokes and the strong either repress or relent. It is simply the world we live in.

Like Spartacus, the Martin Luther namesakes, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and the Ekitis of the old Oyo Kingdom in Western Nigeria, Micah Whiteunderstands this tool and has deployed it to great effect. He is credited as a co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, perhaps the most visible protest movement of the last twenty-five years, and is by extension an uncle to similar uprisings elsewhere. This he has achieved alongside Kalle Lasn, a Vancouver native, using the provocative Adbusters magazine as a launching pad. White, however, considers the Occupy movement a constructive failure, and in a talk given at the Southminster United Church, Ottawa–and further explained in his new book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution—he explains why he holds this opinion and the possible futures of protests in this era.

Here are a few things about Micah White. Thirty-four, he is of mixed heritage–half African-American, half Caucasian– and he speaks in a river’s rumble of a voice. He likes to keep his hair–which is more a young lion’s mane–together using a bandanna. He has been an activist since he was thirteen and in public schools, once founding an atheists’ club and eventually landing on an episode of “Politically Incorrect.”[1] For him the visual imagery of Adbusters, combined with its rich symbolism and creativity, was what drew him to the magazine, and eventually a memo he sent out became the blueprint of the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the eventual fallout between Adbusters and the Occupy movement Micah is reticent.

In Ottawa he speaks of his work with Adbusters and the e-mail that shook the world and engendered protests in at least sixty countries, and he opines that the success of all social movements come from a combination of an established social network, a contagious mood, and creative tactics. He focuses mostly on this contagious mood and in the talk, the Q&A session and his book he is enthusiastic about the role of what he calls “spirit–the inner force that grants patience, perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity.”[2] Like the Luther-named leaders and most of his African-American predecessors, White firmly believes that a spiritual element is key to the success of all protests, and that the very act of protesting is capable of opening doors to transcendence for its participants. The absence of this element is a major critique of his for the Black Lives Matter movement, which to him has lost its way by rejecting the deep spirituality of its predecessors.

An important part of White’s work are his Four Theories of Revolution: voluntarism, which works on the premise of human action being the only way through which lasting change can come and under which most contemporary activists work; structuralism, which teaches the insignificance of human intent on the creation of lasting change and instead credits economic and natural forces for any changes; subjectivism, which teaches that outside change comes from inward change, and; theurgism, a somewhat mystical and largely forgotten theory which credits lasting change to divine intervention. White believes that all four theories are needed for effective protest, and history mostly avers. America’s Founding Fathers, actively seeking to break out from under the British monarchy, invoked divine will, called for human action against the perceived oppressiveness of the monarchy, wrote magnificent works on the “American spirit,” and provoked a British crimping of Boston’s commerce, all of which led to the American Revolutionary War. Nearly two centuries later African-American civil rights movement fought redlining and the Jim Crow economy, borrowed liturgical language from Jewish and Christian canon to state the case for equal rights, marched in the streets, and leveraged whatever economic power they had to see that they and their descendants were guaranteed equal treatment by the US government.

White also sees the current forms of protest as largely corrupted by the media and contemporary activists who prefer online rants to actual grunt work. He derides the degradation of protest into performance art, an inevitable occurrence given the way such protests are covered by media conglomerates as expressions of mostly-youthful belligerence, often with insidious racial, religious and ideological undertones. Conversely, he criticizes online activism as a form of narcissistic justification without, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, “skin in the game.” He is right to put it that way, however unpleasant it may sound. The rise of hashtag activism and “spreading awareness” campaigns do little to confront actual, lived realities as much as comfort the keyboard warrior that one has played a part by “supporting” a cause, however far removed an individual’s immediate reality actually is from said cause. Awareness of a given injustice is a byproduct of the work done to right that injustice and should never be the goal nor a tool of any protest group, he argues.

Since he considers most of contemporary activism either too deeply rooted in certain ideologies to be pragmatic or just plain ineffectual, White looks to the rural areas, feminist activism, and protest-bots for the future of activism. These possible hotbeds have largely been overlooked, he says, and he is convinced that the perceptions of bourgeois and liberal urbanites of the rural communities as largely conservative and racist hotbeds are misguided. Rural communities are well aware the way the wind blows the world, he says, and because of the ineffectiveness of the urban, liberal-leaning left it will be they who will eventually decide how the world reacts to the winds of change. He also envisions a global female movement fighting for women’s rights the world over as a welcome future of protest, and he believes in the use of technological advances to further activist causes. However, the excessive presence of a thing inevitably signals its devaluation, and he argues that the ubiquitous nature of the Internet has served as a double-edged sword for protest movements in these times. Protest should never be easy, he says, admitting to being scared every time he has to protest.

The key to understanding Micah White and his work lies at the intersection of the mystical and the physical realities and his reasoned understanding of the machinations of our world. While his work has shown how potent human activity can be in creating global change he is keenly aware of a spiritual input to the success of his work and in no unclear terms states that all protest is fundamentally spiritual. He is loath to completely endorse one given worldview, preferring to learn as much as he can from all and adapt as needed, chameleon-like. But perhaps the deepest truth we can glean from White’s important work, no less an unhappy truth, is that protest without backing power is limited in its possibilities. An example: the global antiwar march of February 15, 2003. In an interview with Justin Campbell of the Los Angeles Review of Books, White points out the naïve assumptions made by the protesters who assumed that large numbers of protesters corresponded to increased influence over President Bush’s decisions[3]. The age of mass marches and public protest as the ley tools for effective change is drawing to a close, he argues, citing the failures of the People’s Climate March to achieve any meaningful results concerning climate change and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement to stem the nationwide killing of young black males in the U.S., amongst others.

It is the way of the world that the strong mostly win, and that the perceived weak are entertainment for the strong. But protest against injustice all humans must, remembering it is also the way of the world that few lions can survive repeated kicks to the head from a wildebeest’s hoof.

In this series, Rudyard Griffiths, chair of the Munk Debates, Canada’s leading public-affairs forum, discusses issues and trends just over the horizon with renowned analysts and policy-makers.

Micah White is considered a co-creator of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which sprang from an idea put forward while he was a senior editor with Adbusters magazine in Vancouver. Now based in Oregon, he is the author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, published this week by Knopf Canada.

Rudyard: Micah White, welcome to The Next Debate podcast.

Micah: Thank you very much. I'm so glad to be here.

Rudyard: Well, let's dive right in here, and have you unpack an interesting title for this book, The End of Protest and a New Playbook for Revolution. Those two ideas seem in conflict. What are you getting at?

Micah: Well, the book basically comes out of this realisation that we've been having the largest and most frequent protests in human history, and yet these protests don't seem to be creating the social change that we desire. So on the one hand we're living through the end of protest, which is a time when protest is no longer effective, but on the other hand I see that there is optimism about the possibility of revolution. So the book is really dealing with both of those things. It's how we break out of this period of stagnation around protest. How do we make it effective again, and what kind of revolution is possible? What would it look like, and how do we imagine that?

Rudyard: Let's go to the stagnation quandary first, because you're right, there are all kinds of reasons why we would expect people on the street…record levels of economic inequality across Europe, the United States, increasing dissatisfaction with political elite so, again, why the lack of the type of social ferment that we saw throughout the 20th Century?

Micah: There are basically two factors that play against each other. On the one hand there's the common response, which is that we live in a time of unprecedented police control, where we have surveillance of the internet. We have armoured police using military grade technology to disperse crowds and this kind of stuff, and that renders a lot of those contemporary urban protest tactics obsolete. On one hand, I think that's probably true, but on the other, I think there's a more significant and deeper insight, which is that the paradigm of protest, the theory of protest, that underlies contemporary activism is actually broken, and the main idea underlying contemporary protest is that if we get millions and millions of people into the street and they say a unified message and they're largely non-violent, then our elective representatives will have to listen and real change will happen. But we've seen, repeatedly, that when activists actually achieve that goal, which is very hard to achieve but it's happened during Occupy Wall Street, the anti-war marches in 2003, the climate marches – when that happens it actually doesn't yield the social change that activists have been chasing, so activists have been following an illusion about what creates change and that's, I think, the deeper insight about why these protests aren't working.

Rudyard: So let's go deeper on that. You're saying, in a sense, that activists are feeling empowered by getting out on the streets, making their voices heard, but the actual mechanisms for change are within governments, within power structures that seem immune to the influence of the street?

Micah: Right. I think that there's a paradigm of activism, and one paradigm is that our human actions create change, and that if we can get lots of people into the street to force their representatives to do things, then they will. But on the one hand we've learned that that's not true because elective representatives are not required to listen to protests. In fact, protests have become just part of the spectacle, so that protests don't indicate that they need to do change in their behaviour, it's just something that is part and parcel of doing politics. So I think that there's a deeper, more philosophical thing going on here, which is the idea that social change only happens during historic moments of economic crises that aren't impacted by human agency, that don't involve human action. And then there are other options. Another option would be that social change actually happens when we change how we view the world, and that this process, this kind of inner-transformation is what actually changes the world and stuff like that. So I think that, on the one hand we have elective representatives who aren't beholden to these street protests, but on the other hand we have to realise that street protests are just acting out one theory of what creates change, and then there's other theories of change that I try to get into in my book.

Rudyard: Do you think part of the challenge of protest, in our day and age, is that we're just ... we're too successful. We're too satiated, too much cable television, too many Smartphones. We're in a post-revolutionary age.

Micah: So, to take the first part of your question, you're right that there's one theory which is called the J curve, which is that if you have a period of economic prosperity, that suddenly reverses, then the people are more likely to have a revolutionary moment and that's echoed by Marxian historical materialism and this kind of stuff. And on the second part, about have we moved into a post-revolutionary age, I think that's not true. I think that there is an interesting phenomenon that seems to be that democracy is more resistant to old style revolutionary change…like democracy seems to be more resistant to the kind of revolutions that swept Russia and China and stuff like that. But on the other hand I think that revolution seems to be even more likely today because of various factors, like the speed of the internet and the ability to move tactic, and that what seems to happen in human history is that revolutions happen at the precise moment when they seem least likely, and that's something that's observed throughout history … that revolutions actually seem to happen precisely when we think they're not possible. So as soon as I hear people say we're in a post-revolutionary age, I'm like wow, I'm like even more convinced that we're closer than ever.

Rudyard: Good point. Let's talk about ... again, you say revolution comes about through changes of how people see themselves, their own agency, a kind of reimagining of the world. You must be familiar with the work of labour historian Steve Fraser who, in his recent book, The Age of Acquiescence, makes this interesting point that the great revolutions around the Gilded Age, the revolutions in labour, for instance, were the result of people having a memory, a lived experience of a world before the capitalism that they were facing off against, a more pastoral, rural, agrarian world, whereas now, according to Steve Fraser, we're so deep into the capitalist matrix, as he would characterise it that, again, it's just very hard for protest to take momentum, to have real impact beyond the Occupy Wall Street-type model.

Micah: The one thing that seems to be a key to triggering these revolutionary moments now, and I really get to this question about changing people's minds, is that it's like a collective awakening, and we're probably diagnosing a situation correctly, which is that a lot of people, nowadays not only think the revolution isn't possible, they also think it might not be desirable. And what happens though, is that in moments like Occupy Wall Street, all of a sudden they wake up. It's like coming out of a dream, and all of a sudden they see like wow, it's possible, it's within reach, it's desirable, I want it, and they lose their fear and they start jeopardising the status quo and they start quitting their jobs, like we did during Occupy Wall Street. So I think that the challenge for activists is how to trigger these collective epiphanies, and I think that these collective epiphanies are always possible, but it has to do with how do you trigger them. And then nowadays, I think a lot of activism is so based around rationalism and facts and all this kind of stuff, that it misses out on the deeper problem…to really spark these awakenings, these emotional awakenings, is a question of appealing to people's spirits and people's hopes and imaginations and dreams.

Rudyard: Tell us about the time that you really felt this with a big crowd, 30,000 people, I believe it was part of one of the early Occupy Wall Street protests. You looked around, it was your friends, your neighbours, others, and you felt that there was this, kind of, electrical revolutionary charge in the air.

Micah: Right, yeah. I think that one of the most beautiful moments of Occupy Wall Street that I experienced was in Oakland when we shut down the port, and it was after a protest that an Occupier had been seriously injured by police, and basically the whole Bay area just marched down to the port and we shut it down, and I remember on that day, you know, people were sitting in small groups. They were sharing food, everyone was smiling, everyone's eyes were bright. I remember telling my friend here, everyone's so beautiful, you know? Everyone looks so beautiful, they were so alive, and I think that that is the key to what constitutes a revolutionary moment today … it's a process of waking people up and having that sudden epiphany spread through that society.

Rudyard: Okay, well so to move onto the second part of the title of your book, A New Playbook for Revolution, what are you recommending to your fellow activists here? What are the, kind of, tactics and strategies that you think are going to get us over this, kind of, malaise, or this entropy around ... not mass movements, because these exist, but mass change?

Micah: Well, I think that’s kind of a tactical question, and that relates to what we've been talking about theories of change, but I think one of the aspects of my books, that people will, I think, dig into and really enjoy, is this idea of well, what are some of the revolutionary scenarios that could happen, you know, and I lay out three. Three revolutionary scenarios, directions that activists could be pushing. One of them is the idea of a, kind of, rural revolt. You know, I live in rural Oregon, and one of the things I've realised is that the actual power is, I would say, a little bit weaker in the rural areas. The idea of small groups of people gaining control of city councils and mayorships and all this kind of stuff, it actually seems possible and easy, and so that one idea is some sort of rural revolt, where people gain sovereignty in local communities. The second idea is this idea that we're going to have global social movements that can win elections in multiple countries, and we've already seen that start to develop in Europe, the idea that we don't need to just win elections in Greece or in Spain, we need to win elections in Greece and Spain and Germany and Canada, under one social movement. So the idea there is that social movements need to start learning how to not just protest, but also do the behaviours typically associated with political parties, which would be winning elections, putting forth candidates, and stuff like that. And then the third revolutionary scenario is this idea that we're going to develop autonomous artificial intelligences that will ... I call them protest bots … that will allow us to spread social movements using technologies and artificial intelligence in a new kind of way.

Rudyard: Let's probe deeper on some of these, specifically your idea of social movements translating themselves, converting themselves into political movements, and doing that on a global scale. What do you think what happened with Syriza? There was a very powerful, progressive social movement that captured government in Greece, and then signed a bailout deal that embraced German-style austerity?

Micah: That's a very good question. So, if we backtrack and we look at what Occupy Wall Street was doing, Occupy Wall Street was holding these general assemblies in public squares and acting in, kind of, a consensus-based democracy, because we believe that somehow sovereignty would translate into these assemblies. That if every day people started discussing amongst themselves, having these democratic assemblies, that the police wouldn't be able to attack us because we would be the sovereign power. Well, we realised that that's not true. Actually, sovereignty, in our societies, is only given to the people who either winelections or win wars. You know, there are only two ways to really gain sovereignty, and winning wars doesn't seem like a possible thing. So winning elections actually seems like something that can happen and we've seen happen in Europe, but winning elections, as you pointed out, presents its own challenges, because if you use the old party model of winning elections, then you're electing the leaders, and these leaders, again, fall under the same ego traps that we tried to escape with Occupy Wall Street. They, again, become representatives instead of delegates, and they can sacrifice the ideals of the movement that got them into power. So that's why I look at the future as a hybrid between a movement model and a party model. Movement model being that it's decentralised, horizontal, it's based on the people. And a party model being that there are certain behaviours that parties do that social movements need to learn, such as canvassing and caucusing, and a way of gaining signatures and getting on ballots and getting people to vote. So there's really this tension between how are social movements going to gain control over the party, control over the leaders, without letting them just do the old game, which we've seen so many times before, which is get into power and then all of a sudden sacrifice the ideals of the party, but I think that’s where we're going. Those are the challenges that need to be addressed.

Rudyard: Let's talk a little bit about Black Lives Matter, because this is a new movement that we're seeing. It certainly has currency, it certainly has profile. You though ... well, you embrace its goals and its purpose you're critical.

Micah: First it's important to say ... I'm black, so I totally support, obviously, Black Lives Matter as a concept, but I think that if we look at it critically, self-critically, as activists, then I think it's very clear that Black Lives Matter didn't learn the fundamental lesson of Occupy Wall Street. The fundamental lesson of Occupy Wall Street was that protest alone, you know, public spectacles alone, mass movements alone won't force elective representatives to do anything, and I think if we see Black Lives Matter repeat the same disruptive behaviours and maybe innovating new disruptive behaviours like blocking traffic and stuff like that, you see that they haven't learned that fundamental lesson, and then I think, on the other hand, you know, Black Lives Matter, it's a regression back to the kind of national social movement, American-based politics that I think Occupy Wall Street really escaped. Occupy Wall Street was beautiful because it was a global social movement that spread to 82 countries that linked up with the Arab Spring, with the movements that were happening in Spain, and that's what really, I think, made it powerful and so I think we'll see activists are going to have to learn the lessons of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in order to launch what will be something great to come.

Rudyard: You characterise Occupy Wall Street as a constructive failure. What were you getting at there and what do you see as Occupy 2.0 that would understand what the failure was, how it was constructive and improve upon it.

Micah: Well, there's an attitude amongst activists that is really detrimental, and that is basically that there's no such thing as failure, that we haven't ever failed, that everything's a success. They like to say oh, Occupy Wall Street it splintered into 1,000 shards of light, it wasn't defeated, it just merely transformed itself, all this kind of stuff. I mean, that rhetoric is really positive and it feels good, but it's not true. Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure because we set out to achieve a very specific goal, which was to get money out of politics, and we failed, and we failed because, as I've been saying, we based our actions on a theory of change that wasn't true, and we didn't know it wasn't true. We had to test the hypothesis and we tested it, and we found out it's not true. So we need to do a new message, and I think that that's really important to say, as I told you, it's a constructive failure because it taught us something very important. It wasn't a total failure, because it did achieve some goals. So you look at like, what could Occupy 2.0 look like? I think it gets back to this question of how are social movements going to actually gain and control power, and the only way I see social movements to actually do that, is to figure out how to win elections, and a lot of times when people hear me say this they think I'm talking about Bernie Sanders. I'm not talking about Bernie Sanders, I'm talking about a social movement, a decentralised social movement, a horizontal social movement that is global, that goes into multiple countries, that carries out a unified agenda by targeting elections, winning elections in all of these different countries, and figuring out how to use the process of consensus-based decision-making or new forms of decision-making, to give voice to the people, and that's the direction that we're going to go, and it might seem difficult to imagine, but Occupy Wall Street was also very difficult to imagine. And we have new capacities … the internet allows us to do these, kind of amazing things now, socially, that are going to be quite surprising.

Rudyard: Just on that point of consensual decision-making, because you and others have rightly brought up that, you know, this was one of the weaknesses of Occupy Wall Street – the way that it empowered people and made them really enthusiastic about the cause but, at the end of the day, that highly consensual model caused some real problems, in terms of, again, operationalising the movement.

Micah: Well, you know, if we get real, we're talking about creating social movements that are trying to institute dynamic social change, transformative social change, and there are forces in this world that don't want that. They're called the status quo, and the status quo will use the norms of a movement against itself, and so what we saw with Occupy Wall Street, is that there are forces that use consensus-based decision-making against the movement in order to paralyse the assembly, and this is something that you see in every movement. I was just reading about how, in the Russian Revolution, Lennon's secretary was a police agent, so there's always going to be these forces that will be in there infiltrating, messing with and stuff like that. The real failure of Occupy Wall Street is that we weren't able to adapt. We weren't able to see that that was happening, and then at the same time adopt new decision-making models. Instead we just became paralysed, weren't able to make the complex decisions that were necessary. For example, we weren't able to come up with one demand. We weren't able, as a movement, to negotiate. We weren't able, as a movement, to like articulate clearly enough for the mainstream, and so these are all things that need to be addressed, but the main problem is figuring out how do you switch tactics midstream, as a movement?

Rudyard: Final question then. As you said, you can't describe it, you can't put a finger on where and when and how revolution will happen but having written this book, having thought about this for a while, what are the signs that you would look for? What would be the symptoms that you'd diagnose in the body of politics, suggesting it was moving towards a revolutionary state?

Micah: Good question. Now, basically, I think it's a little bit of each of the four areas of social change that I get into in my book. So if you want objective factors ... I think there's been some compelling studies that have said food prices indicate a revolutionary moment. So when food prices break a certain threshold on the UN Food Index, a revolutionary moment is more likely to occur, and we saw that during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. On the one hand, I would start to look for are food prices increasing or decreasing, and then on the other hand, I think there's a, kind of, spiritual, intuitive ... a mood among the people. You know, are people, in their gut, are they happy with the society? Is there a quiet before the storm, which is what I think we experienced right before Arab Spring, you know, those dictators that ... you know, Mubarak, and in Tunisia … they seemed so powerful and invulnerable, but then, of course, they would pop up so quickly. So I think, on the one hand, it's a, kind of, spiritual mood among the people, among the youth, and then we have external factors like food prices, how the economy's doing, and then I think there's just factors outside of human control, and possibly not knowable for us, you know, that we can get into in a future interview maybe.

Rudyard: Micah White, always provocative, always interesting. This is an important book and an important topic, and congratulations for putting pen to paper and bringing it to us.

Is protest broken? Micah White, the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, former Adbusters editor, and the author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, thinks so. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history, yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance. A lifelong social activist with a twenty-year record of innovative approaches to creating social change, Micah takes audiences through his theories of mass movements that are destined to inspire—and catalyze—the next generation of global actions. Micah has been touring to promote his book, and sat down with NOW magazine to talk about it:

Micah White has been conducting experiments in revolutionary activism since he was 13, beginning with his refusal to stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an Equal Access Act fight to form an atheist club in high school. That last one landed him on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

Now the former Adbusters editor and co-instigator of the Occupy movement has some choice words for today’s activists: protest is broken. It’s time to revolutionize the pathway to social change.

NOW chatted with White about the power of spiritual epiphanies and the future of protest ahead of his appearance at the Toronto Reference Library on Thursday (March 17).

Not everyone knows that the Occupy movement started as an idea developed at Adbusters by you and Kalle Lasn….

Kalle and I wrote a tactical briefing that called for American activists to bring the tactics of [the Tahrir uprising in Egypt] and [the anti-austerity movement] in Spain to Wall Street to break the stranglehold that money has over our democracies. Our briefing captured the imagination of activists, and events quickly spiralled out of our control. Occupy Wall Street spread to 82 countries because few people knew the true origin of the movement. This was both an intentional strategy and a by-product of the horizontal and leaderless structure of the movement we’d called for in the original tactical briefing. The participants, and not the creators, controlled the destiny of the movement.

You say Occupy was a gift to global activists, both in its success and its failure. What illusions did it help bust up?

Occupy Wall Street was a nearly textbook example of a social movement that should have worked. But it didn’t. That is why I call Occupy a constructive failure. The movement taught us that contemporary activism has been chasing an illusion: the idea that the most effective form of protest is to get millions of people into the streets because then our elected representatives will be forced to heed the wishes of the people. The first goal of my book is to shift the paradigms of protest by challenging activists to question this dominant theory of activism.

Organizers of recent climate marches would counter that the presence of millions on the streets around the globe pressured world leaders to take action on climate change. Do you totally reject that?

I certainly reject the notion that single-day, large-scale, docile marches exert any real pressure on global leaders. On the contrary, these events have become an integral part of the political spectacle designed to distract the people from pursuing an actual revolution, dissipating their energy and wasting their time. Rather than trying to build movements that “pressure” global leaders, it’s time for activists to imagine how a social movement could replace global leaders.

You’ve said newer protest methods like the Clicktivism of Avaaz are ruining left-wing activism, too. Are you seeing any signs of innovative activism percolating?

I see signs of innovative activism happening at the edges of politics both on the left and the right. Social movements require a willing historical moment, a contagious mood and a new tactic. A new tactic can be consciously created by importing new protest behaviours from abroad, like we did with Occupy Wall Street. I just returned from Bali, where I gave a talk to 250 international high school student activists from across East Asia. I was amazed at the sophistication of their thinking about activism, especially the students from Singapore and China. I also met with some of the organizers of Tolak Reklamasi, a social movement whose impetus to stop the destruction of a grove of trees I found eerily similar to Turkey’s Occupy Gezi. The innovative aspect was the movement’s use of pre-existing indigenous local governance structures at the neighbourhood level to quickly scale up the protests.

Your book is surprisingly spiritual. Your “unified theory of revolution” suggests that prayer, ritual and faith in divine intercession may be one of the most effective forms of revolutionary activism. That’s quite a shift from your early days fighting for -atheist rights.

Social movements are a collective awakening, or a contagious epiphany, that spreads throughout society. Anyone who has experienced one of these magical moments has felt this. The spiritual side of protest was openly discussed by many participants of Occupy Wall Street. My shift away from strict atheism is motivated by the experience of Occupy and the conviction that secular materialism has dominated leftist revolutionary theory for too long, preventing activists from developing new tactics that go beyond physical action.

A palpable spiritual vibe is definitely spreading in parts of the activist community. But a lot of activists are staunch atheists. What is the big spiritual epiphany that you hope to see become an “emotional contagion”?

The epiphany that changes the world is the loss of fear. This spiritual sensation of fearlessness, of submission to a higher purpose, quickly inspires people to break their old habits and start living without dead time. Atheists can rationally resist the spiritual side of social movements, but they still experience it emotionally and benefit politically. Creating epiphanies is a form of warfare that all activists, religious and secular, must learn to master.

You write that environmentalists have fallen down a rabbit hole of computer modelling and proving climate abstractions, and that there’s a direct line between today’s “technocratic environmentalism” and a future hijacked by disaster capitalism and authoritarianism. Could you explain?

Environmentalism is overly dominated by scientific empiricism. This has led to an arguably failed activist approach based on abstract goals, like 350 ppb of CO2 in the atmosphere. I see the potential for technocratic environmentalism to be used to justify totalitarianism, or eco-fascism. Given the dramatic scale of the problem, and if the apocalyptic storms continue to grow in strength, we may see the rise of dark forces that cynically use the crisis to gain power. Ultimately, only a planetary social movement can mitigate climate change in an equitable way. And I believe it is important to resist efforts by leaders who may use environmentalism as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. The true revolutionary goal for environmentalism therefore ought to be a global people’s democracy capable of mitigating the climate catastrophe and facilitating the resettlement of climate refugees by breaking down borders.

How can a shift to “mental environmentalism” save the movement?

The pollution of our minds is the source of the pollution of our world. The biggest pollutant of our mental environment is advertising that poisons our collective unconscious with the vices of consumerism.

Our model is unique: we rely on people worldwide who contribute a small amount of money each month to empower us to work on the campaigns that matter most. Instead of becoming beholden to clients who dictate our aims, we rely on patrons worldwide who free us to follow our passions. THE END OF PROTEST is the first major result of this crowd-patron model. Going forward, the birth of a women-led World Party is the main revolutionary scenario we’re working on and the one I’m most excited about.

What gives you hope for the future?

Revolution is one of the most complex, recurring phenomena of human social existence. Although revolutions have been happening nearly every two or three generations since the dawn of civilization, they remain very difficult to predict. In fact, revolutions often occur when they appear least likely. I’m optimistic about the future of protest because I know that revolution is an indispensable part of being human and it is one of the only ways that the people can inaugurate new eras of history.

1. The most important thing we learned from the constructive failure of Occupy Wall Street is that social movements are born when two things happen. One, when there is a new tactic that arises that unlocks the people’s collective hope and imagination. And two, when a new kind of mood spreads throughout society. For example, during the Arab Spring, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire, triggering a mood of fearlessness that spread all over the world. People were no longer afraid of the authorities or of losing their jobs and rushed into the streets to protest. And at the same time, with Occupy Wall Street, we gave the people a new tactic which was the combination of the acampadas with the Tahrir Uprising: let’s go into the financial districts and set up consensus-based assemblies. The combination of these two ingredients is the formula for social movement creation.

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2. There is a detrimental narrative that activists like to repeat which is that everything is a success. We like to tell each other that Occupy wasn't defeated, it just splintered into a thousand shards of light. And you know, that is a positive story, but it is not actually the truth. And false positivity won't get us closer to an effective revolutionary strategy. The truth is that Occupy set out to achieve very specific goal: to end the power of money over our democracies. And we failed. So I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because in failing it revealed the limitations of contemporary activism. The movement was not a total failure, it did achieve some things and it did have some positive outcomes. But it was a constructive failure because it showed us that our methods of protesting and our theories of activism are false.

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3. Occupy Wall Street gave birth to a new generation of activists. It made activism cool again; it made protesting cool again. And I think a lot of those people, and the ethos of Occupy, filtered into Black Lives Matter. But at the same time—and I totally support Black Lives Matter—if I could give a gentle criticism of the movement, I think that Black Lives Matter learned the wrong lesson from the constructive failure of Occupy Wall Street. The truth is that Occupy Wall Street did not fail because we weren’t disruptive enough. Occupy didn't fail because we didn't block enough streets during rush hour. Occupy failed because contemporary protest is based on false assumptions. The number one false assumption is that if you can get millions of people into the streets and be disruptive and have a unified message then our elected representatives will have to listen to us. Occupy Wall Street completely demolished that assumption. We had occupations in 82 countries, we had millions of people in the streets and Obama did not even mention the movement until we were evicted from Zuccotti. So we learned that our elected representatives do not have to listen to street protests: they are not required by the Constitution, they are not required by any sort of law. In fact, they can ignore us because protesting has become part of the daily work of the state. Protests happen and they manage protests and protests are irrelevant to the daily decisions that are being made. The continued reliance on disruptive protest tactics, like blocking traffic, demonstrates that Black Lives Matter learned the wrong lesson from the constructive failure of Occupy Wall Street.

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4. Black Lives Matter actually represents a regression from the planetary perspective of Occupy Wall Street. I think what Occupy achieved is that we created a social movement that linked up with all the global struggles simultaneously: the people in Spain’s indignados movement, the people in the Arab Spring, we were all fighting the same struggle. And that was the most beautiful thing about Occupy Wall Street. We were part of a global social movement. And I see Black Lives Matter as a kind of a regression back to national social movements and a return to national concerns and American-centric politics. We need to keep imagining global social movements because that really is the future of protest.

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5. Here is something most people don’t consider: why was one of the greatest social movements in recent American history created by a Canadian magazine? Why didn't the call for Occupy Wall Street emerge from an American activist organization? And the answer is that American activism is fatally risk adverse. Too risk adverse to call for something like Occupy Wall Street. It is important to remember that people died during Occupy. A person died in Oakland, another person died in Vancouver and there were other deaths of participants in our movement. And that is a really intense truth and responsibility. Occupy Wall Street was one of the most grassroots movements that America has ever had precisely because it was started in Canada: we relied on local activists in New York City and beyond. Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, and I did not go to Zuccotti and try to direct things. Occupy’s origin within a Canadian magazine actually amplifies its grassrootedness.

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6. Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street are the manifestation of a collective awakening. Social movements are moments when people suddenly wake up and something that has been happening all the time—like police shooting black people—suddenly becomes something that is no longer tolerated. Or, with the example of Occupy, the fact that corporations were giving unlimited campaign donations to elections suddenly became intolerable. So these movements are manifestations of collective awakenings, collective epiphanies. And we’re going to continue to see these collective awakenings. But the challenge now is how will these social movements become more effective. How will these movements use protest in ways that are even more effective?

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7. Black Lives Matter did not fully internalize why Occupy Wall Street failed. The next social movement that truly understands why Occupy failed will be more powerful than both Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

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8. One of the things that Occupy Wall Street was unable to do was develop the processes of complex decision making. If you look at the original poster for Occupy Wall Street, you’ll see that it says at the top: “What is our one demand?” Well the movement was never able to figure out its one demand because our general assemblies were not able to agree on a one demand. But at the same time, I think you must distinguish between revolutionary aims and reformist aims. A revolutionary aim for Black Lives Matter would be to become the force that appoints the police, to become the force that controls the police. Whereas a reformist aim would be something like putting body-cameras on the police. We need to dream even bigger than reform. One of the problems of contemporary activism is that we’re dreaming at a low level. Black Lives Matter can achieve something even greater that body-cameras. It can achieve something like being the President or maybe even being the President of multiple countries. A social movement is going to arise that will win elections in multiple countries in order to carry out its agenda globally.

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9. We have prototypes of this World Party in Europe. We have the 5 Star Movement in Italy and Podemos in Spain. The difference between what they’re doing and what we’re going to see next is that we’re going to have global social movements that spread across borders—like we saw with Occupy Wall Street—but that these movements will win elections in multiple countries. Protest will be used not to influence elected representatives, but to win elections. One way to imagine how this could happen is to place all of the elections of the world in chronological order. Then you’d build a social movement that didn’t happen simultaneously around the world but happened, instead, sequentially around the world, leaping from election to election.

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10. Black Lives Matter, or the movement that comes next, needs to figure out how to be both a social movement and a political party. We need to become the ones in power rather than protesting the ones in power.

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11. There are some things about Black Lives Matter that are more advanced than Occupy Wall Street. And one aspect that is more advanced is that for Occupy the tactic was synonymous with the movement. So once the tactic of occupy stopped working then Occupy Wall Street was defeated. Whereas with Black Lives Matter, it is smarter not to have your movement be synonymous with a specific tactic. Instead, the movement is synonymous with its message.

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12. There have been large scale protests and revolutions every generation. And we have records of revolutions going back to ancient Egypt where there is a papyrus that talks about the king being overthrown by the poor people. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter are all episodes in a multi-thousand year uprising that has been going on since the beginning of inegalitarian society. And during Occupy, we were very consciously channeling the spirit of the Arab Spring. And I think that Black Lives Matter very consciously channeled the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. And there will be another movement that will channel the spirit of Black Lives Matter into its movement. This is how we pass along the torch of revolution. It is a beautiful thing.

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13. The intensity of the protests are increasing and the frequency of the protests are increasing too. But I want to push back and say: I don’t know if the effectiveness of the protests is increasing. And that is one of the core messages of my book, THE END OF PROTEST. The frequency and intensity might be increasing but is the effectiveness? And that is something that, as activists, we really need to be careful about. There have always been protests and there will always be protests. It is easy to settle for just protesting but we also need to be concerned with whether these protests are working to achieve revolutionary social transformation. At the same time, the only way to overcome a broken paradigm of protest is to replace it with a new paradigm of protest—critique is not enough to spark a revolution. And that is the task I've set for myself with THE END OF PROTEST: I've tried to go beyond critique to develop a new unified theory of revolution, and a method of tactical innovation, that will be the foundation for the next planetary revolution.

DORIAN WARREN: The saying used to be in the 60s, 70s, 80s: “From protest to politics.” And you just mentioned the term governance, so it is not only about protesting but also wielding power and governing. How different is that from previous movements in American history?

MICAH WHITE: Well, I think the main difference that we’re seeing today is that social movements are starting to function without leaders. And so whereas before you saw a reliance on charismatic individual such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King who became the leaders of movements, today we’re seeing that ideas and memes are becoming the leader. The people follow the ideas that are the best. And so the challenge now is how to have a leaderless movement that is also able to do things that are traditionally associated with having leaders. Traditionally only a leader-based movement could elect itself into power. Instead, now we’re thinking about how could a social movement elect itself into power.

DORIAN WARREN: Let me push back on that. When you say leaderless… someone is organizing protests, someone is doing the work of mobilizing people, there are people who are followed on social media… so when you say leaderless is that really, really true? Or do you mean, relative to older social movements there is not one, publicly visible leader? Versus, there are leaders in the movement doing organizing work. Because I don’t want to just assume that all this is spontaneous.

MICAH WHITE: Absolutely, it is not spontaneous. This is an interesting thing to think about. Even today, people tell me: “you didn’t create Occupy Wall Street!” But what leaderless means is that the way you create social movements today is that you make an idea that other people take up as their own. And they actually don’t even know where the idea came from. During Occupy Wall Street, people didn’t know where the idea for Occupy Wall Street came from. They didn’t know Adbusters, they didn’t know who I was. And so what it means to be leaderless today is that the ideas are taken up by the participants, guided by the participants and shaped by the participants. And the participants themselves have more control over the movement than the persons who named the movement. You can go and find out who named Black Lives Matter. But those people don’t have control over the movement. Just like Adbusters and I didn’t have control over Occupy Wall Street. Once we created that protest meme, it went out of our hands and the people took control of it.

DORIAN WARREN: When you zoom out and look at the entire progressive landscape, are there similarities you see across the progressive movement in terms of protest and activism today?

MICAH WHITE: That’s a good question. The important thing to realize today is that all protests are part of the same protest and all movements are part of the same movement. What we’re seeing happen right now is that although people orient around specific policy issues, what is really at stake here is that the people are trying to gain control of the world. The people, the 99%, are trying to get into a political position where if they want, for example, a $15/hour minimum wage or LGBT rights, they have that. Instead of demanding from our elected representatives, we are the elected representatives. The specific movements are just a manifestation of the larger, deeper situation: we’re heading toward a time when a social movement is going to gain global governance, in order to solve the global challenges facing us all—like climate change, income inequality, gender inequality. We’re going to have to build a social movement that can win elections in multiple countries in order to carry out a unified geopolitical agenda. So these local policy issues are just manifestations of the same sacred, and eternal, struggle for planetary power.

As one of the original co-creators of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’ve watched student protests sweep across campuses in Cape Town,Missouri, London and Los Angeles with a growing sense of optimism. The history of protest suggests that students are often the first to sense the opportunity for revolutionary change.

I suspect that the new wave of campus protests could be the foreshock to the global social movement that activists have been hoping for since the end of Occupy. To increase the odds, here is some advice to student protesters, based on the lessons from my time with Occupy.

First, never protest the same way twice. The birth of a new movement is exciting. But the effectiveness of a protest diminishes if the same tactic is used repeatedly. Once the occupation tactic stopped working in the face of police crackdowns and the onset of winter weather, Occupy Wall Street stopped existing.

To avoid this pitfall, the next generation of student protestors must constantly come up with inspiring fresh tactics and be quick to abandon the methods that cease to achieve results. Given the diversity of tactics used by today’s student protesters—from the hunger strike at the University of Missouri, to the#OccupyNassau sit-in at Princeton, the candlelight vigil at Oklahoma State University and the creative use of black tape to protest Harvard’s Law School seal (an action that inspired a racist backlash)—young activists appear to have internalized this lesson.

Now the challenge is for student activists to move beyond disruptive tactics and to experiment with protest methods designed to spark epiphanies, or awakenings, in people outside their social circles. This means creating a contagious mood that spreads across borders, identities and milieus.

A common misconception among activists is that campaigns should start with actions most people would not be afraid of committing—such as signing an online petition—before leading to greater militancy. That idea, known as the “ladder of engagement,” must be abandoned.

Instead, mass movements arise when courageous activists do something daring that inspires spectators to stop being afraid. When hundreds of people slept in Zuccotti Park, they spread a fearless mood that gave birth to Occupy Wall Street. People from all societies, across economic classes, languages, and religions, rush to join such movements because they share an emotion of collective liberation. It feels uplifting, and a bit intoxicating, to be part of the human wave.

This leads to the second lesson for student protestors: Never confine your protest to a single identity or issue.

Instead, maintain a global perspective that links campus protests to injustices in the wider world. This will encourage all kinds of people to rise up collectively in a bid to gain control of the globe.

Here, too, student activists seem to be learning this lesson. Explaining the inspiration for their #RoyallMustFall campaign protesting the law-school sealhonoring the family crest of slaveholder Isaac Royall Jr., Harvard’s activists cite the ongoing student protests in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town protests began in March with #RhodesMustFall and have continued to rock that country with demands for anti-racism, a freeze on tuition hikes (#FeesMustFall) and greater economic equality.

The next step is to link the campus unrest in America, UK and South Africa with the broader people’s democracy struggles everywhere. As Martin Luther King, Jr puts it: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” All protests are part of the same protest; all social-justice movements are part of the same movement. Use specific demands to coalesce energy for change, but never lose sight of the larger goal: a liberated world governed by the people.

Lastly, social movements require a willing historical moment—such as a worldwide political or economic crisis.

This is something that student protesters can’t control. But if the timing isn’t correct, then a social movement will not erupt. That is why,according to Friedrich Engels, the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848 fizzled out after the economic situation improved. Similarly, activists in the US were unable to catalyze a social movement in the aftermath of the anti-war protests of 2003 until the financial crisis gave rise to Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Patience may be the most difficult lesson for many young activists to accept. Still, it’s vital to maintaining a balanced perspective that knows when to act and when to wait.

It is ultimately impossible to know for certain whether we are heading toward one of those rare historical moments when the world is ripe for sudden change. However, there are compelling indications that the time for action is coming. For one, studies have shown that the rising cost of food often presages a revolutionary moment. This October saw thesharpest increase in global food prices in three years.

If food prices continue to rise, and the ensuing economic crisis triggers political instability, then creative activists will have an opportunity to spark a worldwide social uprising. We might be closer today to a global revolution than ever before. Can you feel it?

—Micah White is a lifelong activist and the author of The End of Protest, a playbook for the next generation of activists.

What I want to present is a counter-narrative about activism. It begins with Occupy Wall Street and realizing that Occupy was the consummation of our story of activism. There is a story of activism that we tell ourselves which is basically: if you can build a social movement with millions of people and they are largely nonviolent, that the movement cuts across demographics and has people from all over the country and different socioeconomic levels, and that the movement has a somewhat unified message then real change will happen.

So we had that with Occupy Wall Street. We had a once in a generation social movement that achieved a lot of the criteria of what is supposed to create social change. And we realized, in fact, that the story of activism wasn’t true. Occupy Wall Street didn’t create the social change that it set out to achieve.

I call Occupy Wall Street a “constructive failure.” It failed. But in failing, the movement revealed something very important about activism: it revealed that activists have been chasing an illusion. We’ve been chasing a story about how social change happens that isn’t actually true.

So if you look at the last fifteen years. We’ve been having the largest protests in human history and yet they haven’t been creating change. There was recently a protest in India with 150 million people, and in 2003—and this is probably the best example to refer to—we had a global synchronized march where the entire world protested against the Iraq War, which happened anyways. And of course, we have Occupy Wall Street.

The failure of these protests reveals that the story we’ve been telling ourselves and chasing after as activists isn’t true.

Now the end of protest doesn’t mean we have an absence of protest. Instead, the end of protest means we have a proliferation of ineffective protests. Protests as it was originally intended to be—something that changes the social situation in which we live—doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

So what’s our way out of this?

Revolution basically means a change in legal regime. It is when you make something that was once illegal legal or what was legal illegal. With Occupy Wall Street we wanted to change the law around money in politics. We wanted to make something that is legal—corporations and unions giving unlimited money to candidates into something that is illegal. This is a kind of revolution.

Now revolution is the interaction between the human and the natural world.

And almost all activism falls into the category of voluntarism. Voluntarism is the belief that human action creates social change. Activists do actions because we believe our actions are what creates change. Voluntarists believe revolution is a human process that intersections with the material world. That is the most common understanding of activism and it is why people organize protests. Because the idea is that to change something humans need to act.

Well, there is another option. It is called structuralism. This is the idea that revolution is a natural process that doesn’t involve humans at all. It is a natural phenomenon that is the result of, for example, food prices. And there have been studies that have shown that the Arab Spring and Occupy coincided with historically high food prices. And those food prices were the result of climate change. Therefore, revolution is actually the result of natural phenomenon and that it doesn’t involve human action. So you don’t need to organize protests because revolutions just happen without intervention of humans.

There is a third option: subjectivism. This is the idea that revolution is a human process that doesn’t involve the material realm at all. Revolution is a change of mind. Subjectivists believe that if you want to change reality then change how you perceive reality. In this kind of activism, we would all just meditate. We’d change our inner reality to influence external reality.

And then there is the fourth possibility: theurgy. Theurgists believe that revolution does not involve humans and is also a spiritual, or supernatural, phenomenon. This is the idea that revolution is an act of God and that it is an intervention of divine forces into our political reality. This, of course, is the hardest for contemporary activists to think about. What would it mean? God is creating revolutions? So I’ll just give you one example: the conquest of Christianity.

How is that Christianity which was persecuted for three hundred years, and christians were killed in front of cheering crowds, ultimately conquered and became the dominant religion of the Western world? Well it was two spiritual conversations. The first: St. Paul. But the second, and most significantly, of Constantine.

I’ll just briefly summarize that Constantine was going to battle against a rival emperor in Rome when at noon on the eve of the battle he saw a cross in the sky. Apparently his whole army saw the cross too. And that night he dreamt that he talked to Jesus and Jesus told him that he would win the battle. And he did. He won the battle and promptly converted to Christianity and that’s why Christianity won. It was an example of a divine intervention in his eyes.

Right now, Activism needs fundamental reorientation in the way we think about activism. We have the break the script, the storyline that we’ve been telling ourselves about activism. And that it involves opening ourselves these these four ways of thinking about activism, social change and protest.

WHEN A FRIEND PULLED A COPY OF ADBUSTERS out of a black plastic bag and showed it to me, I felt like what we were doing was wrong. We were sitting in the parking lot of our small Christian high school. For a black kid who grew up in a conservative, Republican home, this felt like crossing a line: for me to be readingAdbusters might as well have been the same as looking at porn.

As I started collecting copies of my own, I was afraid my parents would find them, hidden under T-shirts in my dresser drawers. I didn’t fully get what the magazine was trying to do then, really — what it meant to call yourself an “anti-capitalist”; I just thought it felt edgy, and allowed me to question the narratives I was being told. Years later, the same magazine was the catalyst for a movement that would surge through every major city in the world.

Micah White, along with the cofounder of Adbusters Kalle Lasn, began one of the most powerful social movements of the 21st century with an email — calling all who were concerned about our current political state to combine the tactics of the Tahrir Square uprisings with the Spanish anti-austerity general assemblies and bring their voices in order that they might occupy Wall Street. The name stuck, and soon, the entire world was watching as encampments popped up all over, demonstrating that citizens of all governments were tired of their voices going unheard.

Since then, activists have been asking what effective social movements look like and how social change comes about in a post-Occupy world. This is something Micah has been hard at work thinking about, ever since police in riot gear drove protesters out of public parks all over the world at the end of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

As we see new movements come on the scene, like Black Lives Matter, we must continue to ask: What can we learn from the past to avoid the same mistakes that ultimately prevented previous movements from achieving their revolutionary potential.

I interviewed Micah White by phone for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He spoke with me from his small rural town of Nehalem, Oregon, while I was in Los Angeles. We covered a wide array of topics, ranging from the future of protest and politics, race in America, and the future of our species. The following contains the majority of our conversation. Micah White’s book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution will be published in March 2016 by Penguin Random House Canada.

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JUSTIN CAMPBELL:Would you mind by first telling us about your childhood?

MICAH WHITE: I grew up in Maryland and Michigan. The defining feature of my childhood was that my dad is black and my mom is white. My parents were middle class and that meant that I grew up in the suburbs. One thing that’s really important about American history is that intermarriage between races was illegal until 1967. My parents would tell me about how even though it wasn’t technically illegal for them to get married by the time they got married, it had only been a few years since you could be imprisoned in some states for what they did. They would tell stories about how they went to certain restaurants and how they wouldn’t be served and how they faced discrimination. They were also hippie, antiwar type people, which means that I was raised on a lot of stories about activism in the ’60s.

That’s interesting you mention being biracial; I think that’s a huge component when we think about the demographics of the next few generations. Scholar and activist john a. powell has said that mixed race people are the fastest growing demographic in America. In regards to your upbringing from a political standpoint, was there an event in your childhood that triggered your activism?

Really, for me, activism has always been my passion. I’ve been doing activism since I was 13 years old. In high school, the earliest successful campaigns that I did was around atheism in Michigan. I started an atheist club at my high school which lead to me writing an op-ed in The New York Times which led to my being on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect on ABC-TV. That was the earliest expression of my activism. In short, I’ve always been an activist who never really received much institutional support, but at the same time was constantly doing my own thing and innovating my own approach.

It’s obvious that your passion for activism led you in 2011, as the senior editor of Adbusters, to be a part of starting one of the most significant social movements of the 21st century. In your opinion, where does Occupy Wall Street stand today? Is there something next for the movement that you’re involved with or that other people should be involved with?

So I usually start by calling Occupy a constructive failure. For me, that means that in failing it taught us a lot about some of the failed tactics used by contemporary activists. I think that Occupy Wall Street on the one hand changed the whole argument. It changed the discourse and brought a lot of prominence to certain types of activist organizations that now benefit from a new protest pool. It made activism cool again. That’s one story line that exists out there: Occupy didn’t really fail, it splintered in a thousand shards of light.

I think that that’s the kind of false positive outlook that underlies a lot of contemporary activism and leads us astray. The reality is that, actually, Occupy failed to achieve its revolutionary potential because the movement was based on a false notion of what creates social change. A lot of people want to hold on to the nostalgia of Occupy, but for me, it’s easy to say that it was a constructive failure, as opposed to a total failure. It did good things; it had a positive effect, but it didn’t succeed. It’s no longer real, it no longer exists anymore, and it hasn’t existed since the May Day general strike of 2012. Part of what happened is that because of social media accounts, we have the sense that things go on forever. But imagine if Twitter existed in 1968; would there still be an SDS account on Twitter? Would there still be a Weathermen account on Twitter? There’s still Occupy accounts that exist and Facebook accounts and all this kind of stuff, but they’re essentially just walking ghosts.

How do you feel about Occupy being a creative failure as opposed to a revolutionary success?

For me, I’m okay with seeing Occupy as a failure because I think that humans are part of a many thousand-year struggle that goes back to the dawn of inegalitarian civilization. We’ve been overthrowing kings and tyrants for thousands of years. Occupy was just another episode in that long storyline of uprisings. There will be another one. At the same time, there will only be able to be another one if we’re able to let go of our nostalgia for the past. We have to let go of Occupy in order to create another Occupy.

That’s an interesting insight in light of what’s being said about the relationship between the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s and the Black Lives Matter movement. Essential contemporary black activists are arguing that we have to let go of our nostalgia for the former to be able to achieve real change with the latter.

I would agree with that.

So in reading a lot of your pre-Occupy Adbusters work, it seems as though there is a kind of prophetic expectancy for revolution in America in your early writings. Do you feel like there is a system, political, religious, or otherwise that will save us from ourselves? I guess another way to put it is, post-Occupy, is there hope for humanity? Or are we just doomed?

There is absolutely hope for humanity. I think one of the signs of that is the kind of apocalyptic tone that’s dominated leftist activism for a long time is coming to an end and ought to be abandoned. The kind of tone I worked on at Adbusters and promoted there is no longer sufficient.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how near the end of his life, Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher, was interviewed by Der Spiegel and he said, “Only a god can save us now.” And people have really wondered, “What does that mean?” As a kind of theoretical perspective, I think that’s also the situation we’re in right now. Only a god can save us now means that only a kind of divine intervention can shift humanity off the course that it’s going. Only a kind of magical or supernatural occurrence can really knock us out of our patterns that we’ve set and put us onto a new path. I think that could happen at any time; any sort of moment could arise that gets us off that path to destruction. That’s the kind of abstract perspective.

In terms of the concrete perspective — and I think this is really important in terms of Black Lives Matter — one of the gifts of Occupy Wall Street is that it demonstrated the absolute necessity and practicality of having a global, as opposed to national or local, social movements. During the height of Occupy Wall Street, not only were there Occupys in 82 countries, but we were communicating with protesters in the Arab Spring; we were linked up with Spanish indignados and we were all part of the same social uprising, all over the world at the exact same time.

I believe that the future of social change is going to be a kind of World Party: a hybrid between a social movement and a political party that will be able to win elections in multiple countries in order to carry out a unified geopolitical agenda. In terms of how we get there, I think it’s going to have to be some sort of divine or magical intercession into our lives that really shifts the human perspective.

For you, is divine intervention something that can be brought about by human will or human force? Or do we just have to kind of prepare and wait for this to happen?

So the core thing to understand about activism is that there are basically four competing visions or paradigms for what creates social change. I promote a kind of theory of revolution that unifies the four competing paradigms. This is something I get into more in my book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. But briefly, one theory of revolution is called voluntarism. This is the belief that the actions of humans create social change. Another perspective is structuralism. This means that economic forces, outside of human control, such as food prices, cause revolution. The third perspective is that revolutions are an inner process inside of the individual only; this is called subjectivism. In this perspective, revolutions are actually a change of mind and we just need to meditate and change our perspective on reality. How we see reality actually changes and that becomes a revolutionary shift. The fourth is that revolution is a supernatural process that doesn’t involve humans at all. This is known as theurgism; it’s the idea that revolution is a divine intervention. I think that what you want to do is balance all four of those together. It’s not that you can create a divine intervention, but you can be ready for it, you can tell stories about it coming, you can do other things and that’s where the human action element, in terms of voluntarism, comes into play. I think that one of the critiques that I would levy against the Black Lives Matter movement is that it overemphasizes the voluntarism side of activism. In fact, voluntarism is the dominant conception of activism and it’s this idea that all we need is to do physical actions and that will create change.

It seems too that many of these four ways of thinking could be applied and seen in the worship rituals of different religious traditions. I say this because, at the first street protest that I went to, my friend and I couldn’t help but notice how similar the street protest felt to a church service, specifically a service you would find in the black church. What I’m referring to here is the call and response, the passion, the “spirit” moving through the crowd. Do you think comparing religion to protest is appropriate? Do you think that the communal spiritual energy that we felt is part of the draw of protest movements in general, whether that be in Zuccotti Park or Ferguson?

I think that what you observed is absolutely true. When my wife and I went to the Oakland port shut down during Occupy, there was a point, after the crowd of 30,000 people, people who were our neighbors and friends, were there in the streets and it was a beautiful thing. We looked around and we were just in awe. Everyone was just glowing with this inner beauty. In other words, I believe that Occupy was a spiritual experience. It was, in the words that we used at Adbusters, a spiritual insurrection. It was a kind of inner awakening for people where, all of a sudden, people started following their dreams, rather than their fears.

Revolutions, real revolutionary moments, exceed material explanation. The force of the crowd during Occupy Wall Street exceeded the number of people there; there was this shared spirit and shared intensity. So absolutely I think the spiritual part of revolution is one of the greatest and most important parts. That being said, it’s also one of the parts that contemporary activism has the most difficulty talking about or thinking about because of a kind of secular legacy from Marxism.

That totally makes sense, when you think about the fact that specifically within anarchist circles, you find an aversion to religion and therefore an aversion to supernaturalism. How do you sell supernaturalism to folks that are skeptical of systems of religion?

I think part of the way we push back against that aversion is by challenging the dominant theories of social change. I think that one of the mistakes that a lot of contemporary anarchists make is that they confuse symptoms with cause. For example, what they say is that during a revolution, bank windows get smashed; therefore if I smash a bank window, then that automatically means a revolution is happening at that moment the window breaks. But that’s faulty thinking; it’s confusing the symptom with the cause. During revolutions, people smash bank windows, but they also do a lot of other things too. Just because you smash a bank window doesn’t mean a revolution has been created.

Revolutions happen through a kind of collective awakening. The challenge is, how do we create that collective awakening? I think sometimes anarchism figures out how to achieve this awakening, and some kinds of volunteerist theories get to it as well. For example, with Che Guevara and Latin American Revolutionary theory, they talked about having mobile guerrilla units who did acts of violence that somehow would awaken the larger public through their spectacular acts of violence. Ultimately it didn’t work, but they were still getting at the idea that there needs to be something that awakens people.

Whether or not people agree that spirituality plays a role in social revolution, they still benefit from the spiritual nature of social change movements. They can deny that spirituality has a role in social revolutions, but at the same time, they’re benefiting from the fact that spirituality is causing and playing a major role in social revolution.

And perhaps that’s part of why people are drawn to these movements in the first place.

Right.

So I want to go back a little bit to this idea of theories of protest. I think that one of the fundamental premises of protest is that the status quo can be changed. Do you feel that this is a realistic notion? Or is the idea that we can change the world, as Simon Critchley writes, “quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic or dangerously misguided”?

Let me start by saying that I have the highest respect for Simon Critchley; he’s one of the writers I recruited for Adbusters and I always think about what he says very deeply. From my perspective, we know for a fact if we look at the last 2,000 years of human society, we see that revolution is a recurring phenomenon. It seems to be one of the strangest and most complex human phenomena that exist. No one quite knows what causes revolution, but we do know that every once in a while, all of a sudden, people go into the streets, overthrow kings, and institute wild new social reforms.

A good example of this is the French Revolution: they guillotined the king and all of a sudden, they’re shooting all the clocks and changing how time is supposed to be structured; they redid the calendar. So revolution is a phenomenon that we know exists and that we know happens. But at the same time, there is a disconnect because we know that it exists but we don’t know how to create it. That’s where we are right now. Contemporary activism actually doesn’t know how to create a revolutionary social moment. That’s kind of the horrible situation that we find ourselves in. That being said, I don’t think that we should stop believing the possibility of social change. At the same time, I do think we should be self-critical of all the methods that we’re pursuing on that path toward social change.

I agree with you in the sense of thinking about the Civil Rights movement for example, of saying, well there’s a model that Dr. King et al. used that worked then, so therefore that’s what we should be doing now. The first question we should be asking is did the method actually work and what does it even mean to have “worked” in the first place? What did it accomplish? Then, if we decide it didn’t really work, then we shouldn’t be modeling it wholesale without discerning what worked and what didn’t work. I don’t even think King was as uncritical of his methodologies as some would want us to be now; he was always critiquing the movement himself.

Let me put it this way. I think that one way to help us rethink the way we do protest, is think of protest as a form of warfare. I say that because one definition of war is that “war is politics by other means.” Protest is a form of warfare that’s designed to change our political realities using unconventional methods. Once you realize that protest is a form of warfare, then you’re able to say that just because a certain weapon or fighting technique may have worked in the past, obviously it wouldn’t work today. They used to have a cavalry, but we don’t bring out the cavalry out against tanks today. The methods of warfare have changed throughout history. That’s why protest has to be constantly innovating. The grand marches of the Civil Rights era may have worked then, or maybe they didn’t, but it would be a mistake to assume that we can transport them from that time to our time. That’s, I think, the grand challenge of protest in our time.

Since we are thinking about Dr. King, one thing he often talked about was that protest was a means of pricking the consciences of whites through exposing the physical brutality of racism. I see his notion as the ideological precursor to your idea of the collective epiphany. I think we’ve been taught that that’s what happened in Selma. There was a collective national epiphany after whites saw Southerners beating black folks on the bridge and people from the North and pretty soon there were thousands and thousands of people walking across the bridge in Selma.

The reality is that, as Rev. Sekou likes to say, if all the people alive today who said they were on the bridge were on the bridge, the whole thing would have probably collapsed. Thinking about this moment in history, would you classify what happened, in say Selma, as a collective epiphany? If it is, how did that movement lose the energy of that collective epiphany? My take is that people lost interest once the marches were over. If you weren’t a black person, you had the ability to lose interest without that affecting your life. What happens when we have collective epiphanies, but the interest dies out?

One of the recurring features of revolutionary moments is that there’s this sudden overwhelming peak that seems to grow exponentially. During Occupy Wall Street, within 48 hours of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, there were 900 encampments all over the world. It was growing at such a rate that we couldn’t even conceive of what was going to happen next. It was impossible to predict what was going to happen with all of these sudden manifestations. You can’t maintain that exponential growth forever; people get burned out. That’s just not how energy works, you know? That sudden peaking has to somehow be locked in, some way of giving it a structure that is able to persist. Looking at where we need to go today in terms of social movements, we need to be able to combine the sudden peaking of a social movement with the ability to create structures that give it a permanence. That’s why I talk a lot about the hybridization between social movements and political parties.

That’s also how I view the Civil Rights era. You can only go so far when you make demands on the people in power. What you ultimately need to do is become the people in power. If you look at Occupy Wall Street, the reason why we had those encampments is because we believed that holding the general assemblies would give us some kind of democratic sovereignty over our government. Somehow because we were a consensus-based general assembly, the police couldn’t evict us.

That turned out to not be true. We learned again that actually if you want to have sovereignty in this world, you have to either be elected or you have to militarily overthrow the sovereign. I think that right now the only practical or viable option is to become elected. I don’t think you could actually realistically conceive of a military overthrow. I think you’d just end up with a situation like Libya or Syria where it just degrades into a proxy war between nation-states. And so we have to win elections. Social movements have to win elections. That’s a real challenge because you can’t rely on leaders and at the same time you can’t rely on national party politics. You have to be a global social movement that wins elections in multiple countries. That’s the real challenge before us.

Can one be an anarchist and still want to be in politics?

Absolutely! I think that what we’re trying to achieve ultimately is sovereignty. We’re trying to achieve a situation where the people, the collective, say, “We want X,” and then X actually happens because when the people say they want X that’s what happens. Right now, we have a world system where if you hold certain positions and you say certain words, that’s what happens, due to the power of your position. For example, if you’re a governor and you say, “I pardon this death row inmate,” they’re pardoned! They’re off death row. But if you’re the people and you have a protest at the prison and try to pardon that person, it doesn’t work. So I think that if anarchism means trying to gain sovereignty over one’s life or the community gaining sovereignty over itself, then there has to be some process of self-governance that is viable. I think there’s a kind of childish or infantile anarchism that doesn’t even want to engage with the problems of self-governance. But if we’re not going to govern ourselves, then somebody else is going to. And then you’re stuck in a position of just complaining and arguing with this person in power, instead of being the ones in power.

When we read Mattathias Schwartz’s piece on the Occupy Movement in The New Yorker, we see it speaking about the challenges of consensus model for getting stuff done. I wonder too, do you feel as though in the current system there really is no reason for an elected official to listen to a protester? They don’t have to listen to us, and that’s part of the reason Occupy didn’t get as much stuff done as it could have?

One of the greatest stories that we tell ourselves as activists is that if only I can get one million or 10 million or 100 million people into the street, then there will be social change. The reason why we tell ourselves that story is because we believe that we live in a democracy and we believe that means that when large numbers of people go into the streets, the so-called elected representatives have to listen to them. The fact is that that’s not true. This is the core insight of contemporary activism: elected representatives do not have to listen to street protests. We know this because of the February 15, 2003, global antiwar march. On the same day, there were antiwar marches in every single country. There were people in every major city with signs that said no to the war. President Bush went on television and said, “Well I don’t have to listen to those protests because I don’t listen to focus groups.” He called the protests a focus group! Millions of people are in the street and he called them a focus group! That was a defining moment because after that, Western Democracy didn’t even have to pretend that to listen to social movement protest. And so you get into the situation then, where you start doing ridiculous things like having a People’s Climate March that’s destined to failure because everyone knows that synchronized global marches don’t work. They’re designed to get publicity for large nonprofits and NGOs. They’re designed to get more donations and these kinds of things. These actions are not designed to actually succeed because if they were designed to succeed, then we would start from the assumption that, “Well that’s not gonna work; let’s figure out something new.” If you look at it objectively, you can only have one or two large social mobilizations per year. More like one, really. The People’s Climate March was a waste of effort. When you look back at 2014, there was nothing else. You only get one chance to get everyone in the streets.

And can get disillusioned as well. I experienced this a little bit myself with a protest this past April. A buddy of mine and I went to Downtown LA for it. The march was flanked by the police almost like a parade. We ended up going through Skid Row, the poor parts of Downtown LA. That’s where we spent most of our time marching. My buddy and I were looking at each other thinking, “Why aren’t we going to the financial district? Why are we not going to financial district? Why are we not going to the hipster areas? Why are we not going to these places that would not be aware?” The people in Skid Row know about police brutality. They know about poverty. They don’t need to be convinced of anything. I think that’s a prime example of what you’re talking about, where protest just becomes a ritual that everybody does to make themselves feel better, but it doesn’t actually change anything.

Right, that’s absolutely true. On the one hand, there is the benign view that says people are being naïve and public street protest is a compulsive behavior where people say, “Well it didn’t work the last 20 times I did this, but I’m just going to do it again.” That’s the naïve approach. But I think there’s also the possibility of a sinister approach, a sinister perspective, and that’s that they’re intentionally doing this behavior. During Occupy Wall Street, it’s important to remember that there was something called the 99% Spring which was an intentional effort by the progressive community to dissipate the energy of the movement.

Another example for me is that I remember that on the general strike day in Occupy Oakland, they took everyone from Oscar Grant Plaza and we marched all the way out into the middle-of-nowhere Oakland. By then, everyone was completely exhausted. I went back to Oscar Grant Plaza, and meanwhile, while we were gone, the whole area had been surrounded by police with armored personnel carriers. It was obvious that whoever was leading that march was, to me, probably in cahoots with the police. I mean, who are these people who decide the march route, and why can’t we start to suspect that they’re working for the police? I think that’s kind of the problem, which is that it’s systemic. We have activist organizations in this country who are front groups; groups designed to dissipate the energy of revolutionary movements, who receive money and resources and whose people are promoted into high positions within social movements in order to turn them and ruin them. That’s one of the theories that I have that’s difficult to prove but that people need to speak about, that it’s a possibility.

It’s not new either. COINTELPRO demonstrated that this way of operating was the way the FBI dealt with revolutionary movements. Even going back to what you were saying politicians not listening: Nixon ignored a large portion of the nation coming out and saying, “End the war,” and said that instead of listening to the protests, he was going to listen to the silent majority. That’s swinging it, in that direction. That’s an interesting kind of thing to recognize about how our protests are perceived by the “mainstream.”

Definitely.

And so, when Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, recently said that we are living in the land of creative protest, and here I think she’s referring to some of the most recent protests involving Bernie Sanders and other presidential candidates, she’s saying that we’re living in a time in which groups like Black Lives Matter are moving beyond ineffective protest tactics of the past. Do you agree with this assessment?

So I really respect what she’s doing and in my heart, of course, the Black Lives Matter movement, I want as a black person, for it to succeed. At the same time, it’s very easy to fall into the kind of critical or negative perspective. But if I could give some gentle criticism, it would be that, if Black Lives Matter is living in the time of creative protest, then I would say they were only being creative around one theory of social change, which is the voluntarist model. They are too focused on the idea that we need to innovate the specific human actions that we do. I think that’s fine, but there needs to be innovation within the other three perspectives on revolution, that I mentioned earlier. You can’t just maintain a kind of materialist, disruptive perspective on protest. That would be the point that I would make. Innovation needs to happen in all the different kinds of ways we think about activism. Simply changing the ways we are disruptive, doesn’t in itself really solve the fundamental problem, which is, how are we going to become sovereign? If you want to police violence, if you want to stop police from killing black people, killing other people, then you need to be in a position where you’re appointing the police, where you’re picking the police commissioner, where you’re actually picking who the police chief is going to be in each city. If you want to change the police or abolish the police or become the boss of the police, then you have to win elections, you have to be in power. You can’t just be disruptive at the end of the day.

So when Patrisse talks about how we have to protest the police because we live in a police and prison state, and that’s why we have to protest them, is that kind of what you’re referring to when you say we shouldn’t protest police?

I’ll say this. There’s this really great military strategist named B. H. Liddell Hart and he lays out these principles of military strategy. One of the principles that he says is that you should never attack an opponent who is on guard, waiting for your attack. This is the nature of the police. The police are a force designed to be waiting for your attack. That’s why they’re wearing riot gear and armored gear and they have shields and helmets. That’s why they’re allowed to hit you and you’re not allowed to hit them. The police are like a mirror of our own inner reality; they’re just a distraction. They’re a phantasm. They’re designed to distract. They’re bullies who are designed to take your blows and hit back harder than you’re able to hit them.

I think that if you want to defeat the police, if you’re asking, how do I defeat the police in actuality, and that’s your real campaign objective, taking a step back from what I just said, if you want to defeat the police, there is a way to do it.

I think we can take a historical lesson from Arminius. He was a Germanic chief who united the German tribes in 9 AD and ambushed the Roman legion in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. He carried out the greatest defeat of the Roman legion ever; he destroyed them all. It was such a shock that the news spread to Rome, and the Roman empire never again tried to occupy Germanic territory beyond the Rhine. If you want to defeat the police, what you would need to do is have a single decisive victory that so shocked, at a psychological level, the establishment that they would never again try to do the behaviors that lead to that overwhelming defeat. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re going to protest against the police, then only protest against the police once. But when you do, do it in a grand, spectacular way. But in actuality, you know, it’s not about the police; it’s about who’s appointing the police. The challenge is to become the people who appoint police.

That’s a fascinating thought, when you talk about Arminius, and I think it leads us directly to the violence vs. nonviolence debate. When we think about the revolutionary founding of this country and you mentioned the French Revolution and Che Guevara — what all these movements had in common was the fact that they were violent revolutions. In your opinion, must a revolution be violent to be successful? What are the chances that we will see a war on American soil, be it revolutionary, civil, or otherwise?

That’s an excellent question. It’s important to really tread carefully, of course, on this topic of violence. In one interview that I gave, I talked just a little bit about the question of violence. I received tremendous pushback. One well-known Occupy publication said that they’d never publish anything that I write if I talk about violence. This is absurd! There’s a censorship within the movement around even discussing or thinking about the question of violence and the connection to revolution. This is very bad because then what you do is you allow a kind of naïve perspective on violence to persist, rather then having a nuanced nonviolent perspective. That said, the question about violence, again, I think it gets back to a confusion between symptom and cause. During the American Revolution, during the French Revolution, during all revolutions, there is violence. Violence is a symptom of the breakdown of the normal social structures. Again, it’s a symptom of the revolution, but it’s not the cause of the revolution.

Political organizations that have believed that violence is the cause of the revolution and then try to use violence to cause a revolution have always failed. I’m thinking about the Red Army Faction or all these urban terrorist organizations in the 1970s. Even Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia because he believed he could use sporadic violence with his guerilla forces to cause a revolution in Bolivia. It not only failed miserably, he himself was killed and died trying to do this. The thing is that the American Revolution was not caused by violence or caused by a war. Instead, it was caused by a new method of warfare. The reason why the American Revolution succeeded was because the Americans were fighting in nontraditional methods. They were using guerilla warfare: hiding behind trees and shooting at the British soldiers rather than getting in a line. They were using all kinds of new kinds of warfare that the British soldiers couldn’t deal with. And so the core insight is that revolutions happen when the weaker side uses unconventional methods. Those unconventional methods don’t necessarily have to be violent. You can use unconventional methods, but they don’t necessarily have to be violent.

On whether or not there’s going to be a kind of violent uprising in America, I think the only possible scenario that I see for that, is a kind of split between the urban and the rural area of this country. I think that this country is so urban-centric in its culture, in its outlook, in its perspective, that the rural areas, like where I live, are basically neglected or seen as a kind of storehouse for national resources, where they can come in and clear cut our forests and extract our natural wealth. And plus there’s a lot of poverty out here. So I see a possibility for an urban-rural conflict where the urban areas go their own way and the rural folks go their own way. Ultimately, what we need to move toward is a world Party and a world government. The specter of civil war ultimately needs to be avoided because no one really wins civil war scenarios. When civil war seems to break out, it seems to signal the death of any genuine revolution.

So going back to what you were saying about how you defeat the police, what I hear you saying is that there shouldn’t be a massacre of police officers, but rather that’s where the creativity needs to come in; we need to be thinking about creative ways to make this mass spectacle happen nonviolently.

Absolutely. I don’t think that you have to harm the police at all. What I’m imagining would be a kind of humiliating defeat that’s all the more humiliating because it’s not violent. For example, if you look at police tactics of warfare, they always march forward toward the protesters. They hate having anyone behind them and they absolutely do not want to be surrounded. Sometimes I imagine or visualize what would happen if a protest surrounded a large number of police officers and forced them to give up their badges, their weapons, throw them in a fire or whatever, film the whole thing on YouTube and then just walked away. I think it would be all the more humiliating if it were nonviolent. I would definitely advocate thinking about a nonviolent thing. I think when you look at Arminius, nonviolence wasn’t an option. If you nonviolently protested against the Roman Empire, it was called an insurrection and you were crucified. I think we fortunately live in a situation, due to the evolution of civilization, where we now see a distinction between nonviolent civilian protest and armed military intervention.

That’s really interesting, that we’re talking so much about agendas and demands because critics of Occupy have always said that there was no demand. The New Yorker piece talked about how vagueness was a virtue of the community in the park in Zuccotti Square and so therefore the movement doesn’t stand for anything. BLM is getting accused of the same thing. What’s your take on framing protest movements as directionless? How do you respond to the notion that Occupy stood for nothing?

So what happened with Occupy, or if you look back at how we created Occupy Wall Street, I think it’s important for people to transport themselves back into that time, because it was not the same time that we live in right now. What was going on in that time was very special and it was very different from where we’re living right now. What was going on in 2011 was the Arab Spring. In February 2011, the protesters in Tahrir Square beat back people who were thugs sent to kill them; people were shooting guns at them and the protesters defeated those people and forced Mubarak to step down. And then in May of 2011, the Spanish went into the square and started having these general assemblies protesting anti-austerity measures. At Adbusters, we saw the revolutionary potential of this moment. A lot of people did; a lot of people wanted to start a revolution in America. We were the ones who were somewhat successful. What we did is that we sent out an email to our network and said, let’s combine the tactical models of the Tahrir uprising with the general assemblies and bring it to Wall Street. We then need to hold a general assembly and decide on our one demand. And if you look at that tactical briefing, we even suggested a demand. We said that Occupy Wall Street should demand that President Obama set up a presidential commission to investigate the influence of money on politics. We actually called for something; we called for a presidential commission to investigate the influence on money on politics.

When we put that out, I was based in Berkeley, California, and Adbusters and its cofounder were based in Vancouver, British Columbia, so that meant we were relying on activists in New York City to take this idea and make it their own. When we did that, the people who took it up, the culture that took it up, was prefigurative anarchism. They believed you should not make demands of the elected representatives; instead you should build this microcosm of the ideal society and that, somehow, out of that microcosm of the ideal society, the bad society around them would collapse. The purity and goodness of our general assembly would cause the rest of the society to collapse somehow in this magical process. Well that turned out to be not true.

At the same time that it’s not true — that Occupy was never able to develop the kind of complex decision making processes that would have allowed it to settle on one demand or would have allowed it to move toward negotiating with the elected representatives and actually becoming the people in power — it’s also an illusion to say that Occupy didn’t have a core demand. Everyone knew that the core demand was “money out of politics.” We are the 99 percent; we want control over our government. The story that is told now is just one of those stories deployed against social movements.

I think the best response that people can give to that story, the story being, “Well if you guys had a clear demand, then you would have succeeded,” is to refer naysayers back to the February 15, 2003, anti-Iraq war protest, where there was a single demand that was obvious; no one suspects that Bush didn’t know what the demand was. And it also didn’t work. I think that what we need to do is be self-critical and we need to not make demands on the people in power; we need to be the people in power. So the mistake of prefigurative anarchism wasn’t that we needed to not make demands; the real mistake was thinking that we don’t have to be the people in power. We can just build our sovereignty collectively through general assembly. That turned out to be not true. I suspect that President Obama very clearly understood that the Occupy protest was about the question of the influence of money on politics. If he didn’t understand that, it would have been obvious because he would have tried to figure out what these protests were about. Part of the signal that he understood was that he didn’t try to figure out what they were about. He knew what we were about.

That’s interesting because Citizens United had just happened and that’s partially what allowed him to be elected in terms of money. There’s a kind of self-implication that would have occurred if he had listened to the demands and put a commission in place, which was kind of the point.

Right!

So what would be your advice to BLM in terms of having demands?

My first bit of advice for any social movement is to never protest the same way twice. The biggest mistake that we made with Occupy Wall Street was that our movement was synonymous with our tactics. So once occupying stopped working, then the Occupy Movement stopped working. Once we were no longer able to occupy squares, we were no longer able to grow as a movement

In terms of Black Lives Matter, in terms of demands, we need to start challenging ourselves as social movements to do the greatest and most difficult tasks because that’s what’s actually going to save us. What’s actually going to save black people from being killed by the police is by becoming the force that’s appointing or abolishing the police in our communities. Where I live, for example, there are no police. We have a sharing agreement with the nearby town. It’s not inconceivable that social movements could become so powerful that they could be elected into positions of power to actually abolish the police in their own communities, or institute a different form of policing or appoint a new police chief that’s not from the police. There’s so many ways to imagine it once you’re the one who gets to decide. I think that’s the core thing: How do we get to be the ones who decide, without falling into the trap where you rely on leaders and party politics?

There’s also a sense though in which there’s a counterargument that says, “But look at Baltimore! They have a black mayor, a black police chief, and nothing has changed for black folks and their communities. Therefore, becoming the elected officials in power doesn’t really change anything.” So perhaps change must go deeper then race; it’s about ideologies. Part of the question too is, what are the things you have to do to get elected that make you part of the problem, like the money stuff. How do we get around that? This is the question that Bernie Sanders and also Donald Trump are presenting. As we even think about 2016 election, in the post-Obama administration, what are some of the most pressing issues America faces? Is it race? Is it economics?

One of the things that Occupy really did was that it was a global movement. I think that’s also one of the ways that Black Lives Matter represents a micro-regression away from that, in that it’s very much a national movement, or an insular movement focused on America. I think that after 2016, rather than seeing a retreat into American politics, and an obsession with activists in America, that we need to see a return to thinking about a global political situation, a global political party, a global political social movement. These are the real things that we’re facing. I think that on the one hand, it’s the challenge of how to create a social movement that can exert global, social, political power.

I think also on a personal level, I see a growing conflict between the urban and the rural areas. Living in a rural area has really shown me that America is far too urban-centric. Culture is oriented around New York City, and out here we don’t really have newspapers or magazines to orient people’s cultures. That being said, there’s something very important happening in the rural areas as we represent an alternative to the kind of urban-centric mindset. For example, we don’t have a police force, so there isn’t the same tension. In my tiny little town of 280 people, we don’t have any banks, we don’t have any large corporate offices, there aren’t any of these forces that activists have been so obsessed with fighting against. It’s a practical solution that is, moving to rural areas and gaining political sovereignty. That’s one thing I think BLM should think about. Why not gain political sovereignty of small town communities? If you come out here, you realize that the average age is 50 or 60 years old and people are actually excited about the idea of change and passing on the torch to another generation. They’re sad to see their rural communities age out and be abandoned by their youth.

That being said, are there any political action groups that rarely receive mainstream media attention that we should know about?

That’s a really good question. I think that in general, one of the things that’s really important for activists is to constantly be searching the edges of politics, looking for the tactics that are being used by minor movements that aren’t necessarily being effective at that time, but if they are transposed into a new domain, might become effective. Even with Occupy, the occupation tactic emerged out of the student occupations of 2009. Or look at the antiglobalization movement: they used these lockbox tactics that were created in the forests and anti-abortion activism. For me, it’s important to be constantly looking at the edges to see what’s coming up.

But in terms of specific movements or things that I think are interesting, for me, again it comes back to the rural situation. One of the things that’s fascinating about the rural communities is that we’re surrounded by forests, but these forests are actually tree farms, and these tree farms are no longer owned by single corporations. Instead they’re owned by these large real estate investment trusts. These real estate investment trusts are actually traded on the stock market. This means that our forests are being pulped. They’re clear cutting our forests and sending them to China! So the global economic situation therefore has a tremendous impact on our own tiny rural community of 280 people. The stock prices of these timber investment trusts that large institutions and universities are invested in, they’re putting their stock portfolios in companies that own large parts of our forest. That has an impact on our community. What I find fascinating is, how do you fight back against something like that that’s so powerful? I think that the environmental movement is just like Occupy, in that it’s under a period of constructive failure where it needs to reassess. I think that a return to the rural communities could be a kind of trigger for a new kind of generation of tactical thinking. Even by just trying to challenge clear cutting in my community, they’re coming up again against Wall Street in these real estate investment trusts.

I guess my main thing is that activists need to stop being so urban-focused and start looking at the other parts of America and exposing themselves to what’s going on out here.

I agree. When you think about how in the ’20s and ’30s and even before, there were blacks who went to places like Oklahoma and Florida and tried to start their communities. The only reason they did not succeed is because they were torn down by white supremacy. So there’s a model that could be reused without that kind of state-sanctioned white supremacist reaction that occurred then. As we end, I guess I’m curious about whether you see yourself being in politics.

I think that life is long and so I’d never foreclose possibilities for myself. I’m fascinated by the intersection of social movements with social parties. For example, I went to Italy and met with a movement called the Five Star Movement. Within five years, they had become the third largest political party in Italy, and yet they don’t call themselves a political party, they call themselves a social movement. When I met with one of the cofounders of this movement, one of the first questions he asked me was, “Are you a politician?” I told him, no, I’m an activist. And so, I feel that I’m an activist as opposed to a politician. I feel that the future of social change requires social movements to gain political power in our communities, and so whether or not I would specifically run for office, I sometimes think about doing that, but I think that I am more interested in figuring out the deeper question of like, what would be the tactics that would be needed to create that social movement that could become that planetary political party? Those are the challenges that I’m particularly passionate about. I would only run for office if there was an absolute necessity for me in particular.

It might be, though, like the Five Star Movement. The founder abstains from running for office. It might be that the next iteration of social movements are able to be political parties; it might be that their founders don’t run for office to resist that kind of leadership. We saw with Syriza, that once Alexis Tsipras became the leader of this anti-austerity party, then he could renounce anti-austerity and sell everyone down the river. So it might be that it’s not possible for me to run for office because of those views.

Syriza is a great and fascinating case study in the political-social movement hybrid you’ve been talking about. In closing, if you could describe, in a couple of sentences, what kind of world you want your son to grow up in, how would you describe it?

I want my son to grow up in a world where he can freely travel across borders. Where he can go to places in a world that’s heterogeneous. I want him to be able to go to some places that still have indigenous culture and then go to other places where people are living in some kind of virtual reality, cybernetic future, and that they he experience the full range of the human experience, and then be able to kind of travel freely without destroying the heterogeneity of the human experience.

I imagine a world in which there’s one state and it’s called Earth and we’re all on it. People who are refugees are given free passage to move to other places. I was just reading about how Japan’s population is so substantially declining. Why can’t we just let people from all the climate-hit places of Africa go to Japan and meld with that culture? That’s the kind of world I’m imagining: cosmopolitan, in the sense that we’re all citizens of the universe, citizens of the world. I’m a globalist. Only social movements with a global perspective can succeed. Any social movement that doesn’t start from a global perspective is already dead on arrival.

Chuck Mertz: Occupy Wall Street was a failure. Okay, it was a constructive failure. But are we looking at the end of protest as we know it? Let’s hope so. Here to tell us what we can learn from Occupy and the potential future of protest: Micah White, who is credited with being the co-creator and the only American creator of the original idea for the Occupy Wall Street protest.

You are the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street. And you argue Occupy failed. but call it a constructive failure, and we’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s start with the beginning of Occupy. Some people may not even know that Occupy was actually created by a couple of people at an anti-consumerist magazine in Vancouver. So how did you and Kalle create Occupy Wall Street? And more to the point, what was your idea in creating it? Did you foresee what it was going to become? Because it’s a leaderless movement, so I would think you wouldn’t know what direction it was going to go in.

MW: Right. I mean, those are all really excellent questions. I think one of the reasons Occupy Wall Street worked so well is because very few people actually even knew where it came from. It kind of just seemed to emerge spontaneously, all of a sudden. But what really happened is that—if you go back into that time, you’ll remember that in 2010-2011, there were these uprisings happening. The Arab Spring was going on; there was an uprising in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where millions of people were gathering in the square and making the demand that Mubarak step down. And then on May 15th of 2011 there was a Spanish uprising where all of these citizens started going into their squares and holding general assemblies where they started using consensual decisionmaking processes.

So what Adbusters did is we wrote a tactical briefing where we suggested to the world, “Hey, everyone, let’s combine the model of the Egyptian uprising (go to a place of symbolic importance) with what’s happening in Spain (the idea of these general assemblies) and then let’s take that to America and do that in Wall Street. Let’s occupy Wall Street and have these general assemblies.

This poster launched Occupy Wall Street.

And we made a surrealist poster of a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street bull. And we basically wrote a two-page tactical briefing explaining why this would be the next tactical breakthrough that could trigger a revolution.

The moment was just so ripe that 24 hours after we sent that out to our email list and then started posting it on the internet, it got taken up by people in New York City. It got taken up by a computer programmer named Justine Tunney, who started coding the Occupy Wall Street website that became the central hub. And people in New York City took the idea and they ran with it. They started holding weekly meetings in Tompkins Square Park, and that’s how it unfolded.

CM: So this is the thing that I don’t understand. There are two aspects of this. One is that all of the major TV networks—ABC, NBC, CBS—they’re out there interviewing people at Zuccotti Park, and they are annoyed by two things. One is that it’s a leaderless movement, and the movement needs a celebrity; they want to have the charismatic personality that they can have on GMA the next day. So that was one thing they really hated. And the other thing that they didn’t like was the lack of demands, apparently. Because they couldn’t create a story, they couldn’t create a narrative. They couldn’t create a storyline.

So this is the thing that I don’t understand: why did they say this is a leaderless movement, when at any point, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, CNN could have interviewed you or Kalle Lasn on TV and said, “Okay, explain to me what’s going on here and what this is about.” It wouldn’t take that much research. It would take thirty seconds of research to figure out that you and Kalle were behind this, because it goes right back to Adbusters magazine.

To you, what explains this unwillingness to find not necessarily the leaders of the movement, but this unwillingness to find the people who created the movement?

MW: Well, the simple answer is that we made the decision, Kalle and I, to turn down all television interviews. So there were no television interviews because especially Kalle didn’t feel that we should accept them. So there was a kind of rejection of the media.

But about the question of demands—if you look at the original tactical briefing that we wrote, it actually does have a demand. It says that we think Occupy Wall Street should demand that President Obama set up a presidential commission to investigate the influence of money on politics. And that didn’t get taken up, because of the activist culture of New York City. So you have to also take into account what the pre-exisiting activist culture of New York City was, which was pre-figurative anarchism. They wanted to reject the use of demands.

But the second thing about why weren’t on television is that we refused that role. I turned down all interviews from network television. It was not easy to interview Kalle or I about Occupy Wall Street. And whenever journalists would get in touch with Adbusters about interviewing about Occupy Wall Street, then we would refer them to the local activists. I referred them to a local activists who then referred them on to other local activists. So we kind of stayed in the shadows intentionally, and the only real article that was written about Occupy Wall Street that interviewed both Kalle and I and revealed the origins was for the New Yorker. So the New Yorker article is basically the definitive account of the origins of Occupy Wall Street.

CM: How much of an obstacle to the success of Occupy Wall Street—what you would see as a success of Occupy Wall Street—was New York City activism’s embrace of anarchism?

MW: Well, I think the embrace of anarchism was good. But I think that there was a specific kind of anarchism, this idea called pre-figurative anarchism, the idea that you don’t make demands of the society, instead you try to create the society you want to live in and somehow magically it will just work. There was this magical thinking, which was that we can just set up this encampment in Wall Street and somehow that will be the microcosm of the ideal society, and then the bad society around us will somehow crumble and everything will be great. And that kind of obviously turned out to be a failure.

But on the other hand, I think the reason why I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure is because it revealed our false assumptions about activism. And so on the one hand it revealed the falseness of pre-figurative anarchism, but I think on the other hand it also revealed the falseness of the ideas underpinning Adbusters’ approach, which was that if you can bring millions of people into the street making a large, unified demand, and if they were able to stay dignified under police repression, then somehow the government would be forced to listen to them.

But I think it’s very significant that that’s not true. President Obama didn’t even mention Occupy Wall Street until after the Zuccotti camp was evicted. So he didn’t mention the movement until the movement was defeated. And so I think that we’ve learned that it’s so easy to blame other people, but I think we also have to blame ourselves. Occupy was a constructive failure because all contemporary breeds of activism were false, not just because pre-figurative anarchism is false but also because of this idea of mass spectacles in the streets that are somehow supposed to influence elected representatives.

CM: You were just saying how Occupy failed—in the beginning you were talking about how you were influenced by both the Arab Spring as well as the Indignados movement. But there are a lot of people who really believe that this came out of nowhere. At least people in the media; I’m not saying that progressives or people who are activists who are paying attention to this—they may have known about the Indignados movement. Obviously they would have seen the results of the Arab Spring online. But they may not have ever heard of the Indignados movement.

Do we miss something in understanding Occupy when we do not put it into the historical context of activism at that point in time? Because I kind of see—and tell me if I’m wrong—I kind of see Occupy in this bigger arc of protest that maybe goes back to the beginning of NAFTA and the Zapatistas, and then goes through the anti-globalization protest at the Battle of Seattle and then goes to the anti-World Bank and IMF protests that were taking place in April of 2000 before the war, and then the antiwar protests and so forth. And afterwards, even Black Lives Matter and what’s happening with protests in Ferguson and around the country when it comes to police violence—I kind of see these all as one larger context, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily if that’s a correct thing to do.

Should it be placed in the historical context of all these protests, as a new kind of protest that started in the mid-nineties?

MW: Yeah, I mean I think that Occupy was another chapter in a very long story that goes—like you just said—goes back to the anti-globalization movement. But I think it goes back even to the dawn of civilization. People have been rising up against kings and tyrants since ancient Egypt and before. Occupy is part of a long storyline that people have been acting out for a very long time, for thousands of years.

But I agree with you, in the more recent past—if you go back and read the original tactical briefing that inspired it, Occupy was very consciously created as the synthesis of the Arab Spring and the Indignados, and we situated it within the context of an ongoing revolutionary moment that was happening worldwide. And that’s why it succeeded. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Instead, it succeeded because we were able to integrate it into an ongoing social movement storyline.

And I agree with you that what is—and we learned a lot from the previous tactics that had been happening. So there is a kind of destruction of movement knowledge or activist knowledge that happens when we divorce these things from where they came out of. I mean, that’s a kind of way that the status quo neutralizes our ability to create these things again. Because people don’t realize that.

I had lived in Egypt for nine months a few years before the Tahrir uprising, so I was very aware of how unique and special the uprising against Mubarak was and how historic it was, and I was very aware that this was some sort of historical rupture moment that could bleed into America in some way. And Kalle knew that too, and we talked about it on the phone, very consciously. And so Occupy was—yeah, Occupy was very consciously integrated into that story.

CM: How much—you were talking about how protest hasn’t worked…that is, you talk about in one of your speeches that I was watching online—you were talking about how tens of millions of people take to the streets in India and nothing changes; how millions around the world take to the streets in order to stop the Iraq War, and nothing changes.

So all these people take to the streets. The numbers of people in the street are supposed to motivate politicians; they see votes out there and they’re supposed to have an impact on their policy and they’re supposed to change policy. And as you point out, changing the law is really what a revolution is. Getting social change is really through changing the law.

But we have this concept that that kind of protest works because—whether it’s true or not—millions of people went into the streets against the Vietnam War, and that’s what ended the Vietnam War.

So how much does that idea—that the Vietnam War was ended by a mass popular uprising here in the United States and protests on the street—how much does that idea undermine the efficacy of today’s protest?

MW: That’s an excellent question. What happens in human history is that a new tactic will arrive, and it’ll suddenly unlock the passion and the anger and the desire for greater freedom among people. A perfect example is 1848. In 1848, there was a European-wide insurrection that toppled the king of France, spread to Germany, every country in Europe. And the reason it happened is because they created this new method of using barricades to lock down the urban streets in order to have protests. That use of barricades spread everywhere, and the police, the authorities, didn’t know how to respond.

But as soon as they figured out how to respond—which was by using cannonfire and destroying the barricades with cannons—they ended the revolution across Europe within about a month. Ever since then in human history, whenever barricades have been used (for example in the Paris Commune of 1871), they have failed. The same thing happens with other tactics like mass marches.

Scene from the eviction of Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street's encampment in New York on Tuesday, November 15, 2011.

So a great tactic only works once, and one of the lessons for contemporary activists is that we always need to protest in different ways. We should never protest in the same way twice. Same thing with occupying. Occupying was very effective for about two months. Police didn’t know how to deal with these encampments that were spreading all over the world so quickly. But as soon as they figured out, basically, the Bloomberg model of using paramilitary police forces to just forcefully evict the encampments, then all of the encampments were evicted within a week, basically. And occupying never became effective again.

That’s why whenever we see ourselves repeating a tactic nostalgically, whether it’s mass marches in the streets like in the sixties or occupying like in 2011 or other things, then we know we’re making a mistake. I mean, the interesting thing about it, though, is that sometimes very old tactics can become useful again. So in a certain sense, maybe building barricades would work with some tactical twist to it, because in a certain sense the authorities forget how to respond. But still, the larger point is the idea that when we follow the pattern or the script of protest, then our protests are no longer effective. Then they just become part of the ritual, and even though they’re exciting, they’re not going to achieve the social change we want.

So “the end of protest” doesn’t mean the absence of protest. The end of protest means the proliferation of ineffective protest.

CM: One of the things that American culture is into is very quick gratification. You argue that Occupy Wall Street was a failure, but at least a constructive failure. Can we even say it was a constructive failure up to this point in time? Because maybe this social movement will take decades, or I would even argue this: why isn’t “changing the narrative” enough? After all, terms and concepts like the 1% are now in dinner table conversations, assuming people still have dining tables, and still have enough money to eat dinner.

Why isn’t the degree to which the narrative has changed, due to Occupy, enough to say Occupy was a success?

MW: Well I think there are two sides of time. There is slow time and fast time. I think in the long, slow time perspective, I agree that Occupy will have a tremendous influence on our culture. There might even be a revolutionary moment some time in the future, whether it’s one year, ten years, or a hundred years, that directly maybe will even be called Occupy or will reference Occupy. And in that sense, Occupy in the long term might be effective.

But there’s also this fast time perspective, which is when we protest in the streets, we are trying to create an effective event in our own lifetimes, in the present moment. And so I think that it might be —for example, Christians had to wait three hundred years for their protest to effectively win by converting Constantine. And it might be that social movements do need to adopt that larger perspective. Like some people have argued that all revolutions take three generations.

So social movements do need to adopt a long-term perspective, but at the same time, these “fast” protest techniques that we’re developing, the techniques that get people into the streets or are intended to create those events that then fit into a large slow-time narrative—I think those are what are not working.

But it’s complicated. Social change and revolution is probably one of the most sophisticated and complicated phenomena of human society.

CM: You said, “Our tactic was synonymous with our movement, so when occupying quit working, Occupy ended.” I was just saying how people should be careful when it comes to the situation with Sandra Bland; that you cannot make the movement about the individual because what happens if more news or more information comes out that reveals something else about the situation? Her mother was on a local news station here in Chicago, and she was saying that she is not on anybody’s agenda. Her whole deal was she’s on “God’s agenda,” for God to reveal the information that she needs to know, and in the meantime she doesn’t want anybody causing any harm against other people. And so she was pointing out how we shouldn’t just be focusing on her daughter.

On the other hand, maybe you should be talking about injustice in this country. Can you make the same statement about making the tactic synonymous with the movement—can you say the same thing about making a person synonymous with a movement? Because it seems some of the Black Lives Matter momentum was hurt by what was eventually claimed about Michael Brown.

MW: Yeah, I mean, I think the greatest challenge for social movements is to be able to adapt and change in mid-course. And so it was very obvious—I mean, Occupy started on September 17th, and Zuccotti Park was evicted on November 15th. So within two months it was obvious to people who were paying attention that encampments were over.

Poster from the failed D17 re-occupation attempt in NYC.

But you know, Occupy still was not able to change, and it persisted on December 17th by trying to occupy another space, and ever since then it’s still about, “Oh, we have to occupy another space…” And so it’s very difficult for a movement to change course in that way. And I think that that’s actually one of the greatest challenges and what we’re going to have to see are social movements that adopt tactics but then abandon tactics when they stop being effective, in order to create new tactics.

And I think it’s similar with this question of over-identifying with certain people and this kind of thing. It’s the same problem, which is that whenever your tactic relies exclusively on one approach, you end up being defeated. We’ve experienced this—the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine experienced this because they had this idea that internationals wouldn’t be harmed by the Israeli military, therefore they could do acts of nonviolent resistance. But then the Israeli military started harming international activists and they murdered Rachel Corrie. So that tactic ceased working.

It’s a constant game. It’s an arms race, basically, between protesters and power.

Do you believe that protest is far too geared toward having an impact on electoral democracy?

MW: I personally think that the next generation of social movements will be a hybrid between a social movement and a political party. It’ll be a kind of social movement that is able to win elections in multiple countries in order to carry out a unified global agenda. For example, the situation in Greece: imagine if SYRIZA didn’t just have the prime minister of Greece but also won elections in Germany and became the Chancellor of Germany and was able to negotiate with itself because it was a global social movement.

I think that electoral politics are a key battleground for social movements, and I think that social movements will probably be able to defeat traditional electoral parties.

But at a deeper philosophical level of What Is Activism? and What is Protest? there is a kind of materialist secular conception that has dominated activism since Marxist historical materialism. And that materialist perspective says that the only forces that matter are the material forces.

Well, one thing that we learned during the Arab Spring that was very important, is that revolutions are actually caused by a change in mood within a society. The Arab Spring, for example, was triggered by someone setting themselves on fire. And then more people started setting themselves on fire, basically in this demonstration of a sudden loss of fear. They were willing to sacrifice themselves to demonstrate the injustices in society.

And that fearlessness spread throughout the entire world. All of the sudden we were all swept up in this revolutionary mood of losing our fears. “I don’t care if I lose my job, I’m going to the encampment,” and all this kind of stuff.

So revolutions are actually caused by a spiritual kind of awakening that happens within people. And that’s not a material process. That’s a deep inner process. And what I’ve just described is the foundation of Adbusters’ approach to activism. We were conscious of that. When I used to work there, we talked constantly about “creating epiphanies” within people and that kind of thing. That was consciously our approach to activism, and I think that’s why we were able to spark Occupy Wall Street, is because we did see it as a kind of awakening within people.

What I would basically say is how to create an awakening within people that also translates into the ability to win elections in multiple countries and make complex decisions and these kinds of things. It’s a real challenge.

CM: So, is fear and—we were talking to Chase Madar at the beginning of the show, and he was talking about people with Conceal and Carry and people arming themselves to the teeth because they need to “protect their home from crime,” even though crime historically low. Then we talked to Sarah Kendzior about the “I am not afraid” campaign that’s going on in Uzbekistan, with Uzbeks standing up against their very oppressive and brutal dictatorship that disappears people on a regular basis.

So my question is, how much is fear not just the enemy of activism and protest—but how much does it actually help activism and protest in getting people out on the streets? Is fear both an obstacle to activism as well as the fuel for activism?

MW: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a really excellent insight. There’s one notion of activism which is that there is a ladder of engagement, and you need to lead people from the lowest, lamest levels of activism (like clicking links) to the highest levels of activism (like direct action). I think that approach is completely misguided. Instead it seems to me that what really triggers a revolutionary moment is that you ask people to do something that’s really scary.

For example with Occupy Wall Street, we said, “Hey, let’s camp in Wall Street. Let’s camp in the middle of lower Manhattan!” Which is actually a terrifying thing to do. I don’t know. Sleeping on the streets in an urban area is not something that most people are comfortable with. And so a lot of people—that gave them a little bit of butterflies in the belly, a little bit of fear. But when they saw other people doing it, all of a sudden they felt inspired. They lost their fear, and then it became a contagious kind of thing.

I think that the true activism is always something that is a little bit edgy. You ask someone to do something that’s a little bit scary. But when they do it and they display their courage, then other people start to lose their fear, and they start to do those behaviors, and then it becomes a spiral behavior.

But at the same time, fear is a weapon that’s used against us. The most effective way to break street protests is just to brutally beat up protesters, because the average person cannot withstand—we saw this in Oakland—the average person cannot witness police violence more than two or three times before they say, “I’m staying home.” It’s traumatizing to see people get beat up by police, to have sound grenades and tear gas fired at you. And most people will not—or cannot—deal with that more than two or three times. And police know that. That’s why they use those techniques against us.

So fear is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you want to use fear in order to motivate people, because when they experience the loss of it, it’s a tremendously uplifting experience. And on the other hand, you do need to be—we need to protect ourselves from being overexposed to fear and getting traumatized by the police.

CM: You have said, “Studies suggest that protests that use violence are more effective than those that do not. I think violence is effective, but only in the short term, because you end up developing a kind of organized structure that is easy for police to infiltrate. In the long run it is much better to develop nonviolent tactics that allow you to create a stable and lasting social movement.”

So do you believe that while violence may be more quickly and temporarily effective, it’s not as sustainable? Does violence work in the short run but is not a good continued strategy?

MW: I mean, this is one of the most controversial topics within contemporary activism. I got a lot of pushback for even suggesting that we think about violence at all. Because I believe in nonviolence, but I want to have a kind of critical perspective on violence and what is its use, and what is it? And a lot of people in the movement want to refuse that discussion completely.

So for me, protest is a form of war. The definition that Clausewitz—he says that war is politics by other means. And I think you can say the same for protest. Protest is politics by other means, it’s a way of influencing or changing our laws and creating social change by unconventional means, instead of lobbying we protest in the streets. We use forms of direct action and pressure.

So it’s a form of war, so what kind of war is it? That’s really the question. It seems to me that violence —in the seventies there was a study called the Strategy of Social Protest where they did this empirical study of protest movements between 1850 and 1940, and they tried to figure out: is there anything that we can see in the data that determines their success? And this guy, William Gamson, saw that groups that used violence seemed to be more effective than groups that didn’t.

And that was extremely controversial then, as it is now. In the 1970s of course, they had all the urban guerilla movements and all this kind of stuff. So I think that looking back historically we’ve learned that groups that made violence one of their core organizing strategies completely failed. If you look at the experience of Che Guevara in Bolivia where he died trying to use the tactic of mobile guerilla units in a rural environment. It was a complete failure. If you look at the urban guerilla that were used by the Red Army Faction in Germany or the experiences of Italy or Japan, which all developed their own kinds of leftist terrorism—complete failure.

So it’s not that we want to advocate violence. Instead, it seems that violence, if it’s effective, only seems to be effective in the short term, and what you want to do is you want to develop a much larger, broad-based movement that is able to adapt and change.

Groups that pursue violence ultimately lose because they become so insular. The Red Army Faction, in the end, only had about twenty-five members, ever. It’s laughable how small it was.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to reject violence, but we also need to understand why we’re rejecting violence. When people don’t understand why we’re rejecting violence or why we’re doing this or that, then you just fall into uncriticalness that leads to more ineffective protests.

CM: You argue that the current model of protest just doesn’t work. But at times, and in limited ways, I would argue that they do cause change, although they may not cause the larger change one might want. For instance, the protests in Ferguson are not going to end institutionalized racism and white supremacy and all the problems within the justice system within that region. But it did clean house in Ferguson’s police department.

When you say, “The story we tell ourselves on social change through protest isn’t true,” is it true that when the target is small and even possibly a political distraction from the real issue at hand—can then protest be a success?

MW: It really depends on what you define as success. I think that the thing is—anything that happens, anything that is an event has consequences, creates some sort of change. It’s kind of like dropping a pebble into a lake. Obviously there are ripple effects, and we can go back and say, “Well, Occupy Wall street changed the discourse,” or it created a next generation of activists, and that kind of thing.

But the goal of Occupy Wall Street wasn’t to create these reformist changes. It was to have a revolution. It was to have a regime change in America where we got rid of the power of money over our elections, where we overthrew the supremacy of the corporation, where we changed the very way in which we live.

So protest is not effective right now in the sense of creating these revolutionary changes. Whether or not when people go into the streets and make lots of noise—whether or not there are results that happen in the sense of…”things happen…” Yeah, of course, when you drop a pebble in a lake, there are ripple effects. But it’s not a tsunami.

It’s easy for the movement to sometimes just settle for these lower feel-good ways of analyzing what happened. There’s an industry that promotes that perspective. There’s an industry of ineffective activism that actually benefits from ineffective activism by building their email list, by getting donations from people, by elongating their institutional existence. I think we need to be really critical of those stories, and say, yeah, of course, things happened after the protest. It’s not like history just stopped. And it’s not like the protest was completely erased from history.

Things happened, and it altered things. The reality after the protest is different than reality would have been without the protest. But are we having revolutions? Are we creating social change? That’s the real question we’re getting towards. And how do we have a real revolution? Because what we need right now is a fundamental reorientation in the way that we live. And that seems to be what is most elusive.

CM: You define revolution, as I was saying earlier, as making something legal illegal, or making something illegal legal. And with Occupy, you wanted to change the law around money in politics. When I was taking beginning journalism classes, every instructor told me that the most important beat anyone can have, and the most important news story, is always Supreme Court decisions. The real news is made at the Supreme Court, because that is what makes law and that is what makes news.

So can confronting the law—if that’s where revolution resides—is that the next step that protesters are too often unwilling to take? That they want change, but they want it within the law or the agreed upon rules of the game?

MW: Yeah. I mean, there are all these different definitions of revolution that float around, and they really strain our concept of what we’re trying to achieve. And I think one definition that’s been floating around for a long time is basically that a revolution is only what happened in 1917 in Russia, or what happened in Communist China. Revolutions are these communist takeovers of the state. That’s what a revolution is.

I think that a broader definition is more helpful. That broader definition, like you said, is when we change the legal regime. When we make something that’s illegal legal or when we make something that’s legal illegal. And so I do think that the challenge is once you identify that that’s really what a revolution is, is a change in the legal regime, then you start to think through, well, what are the ways in which that can happen?

And I think one of the most important ways that can happen is by becoming the legislature. By becoming the sovereign who decides what the law is. And that would be the ultimate revolution, if the people became the sovereign government. That would be democracy. If we restored democracy, and the people started to be able to dictate the laws that we live under, that would be a true revolution.

I do think that activists have shied away from confronting the more difficult challenges in favor of a kind of culture of dissent that just celebrates protesting in the streets as an end in itself because it felt good to march or whatever, or they adopt a kind of radical posture which is just kind of like liking certain bands while liking certain ways of protest, too. It’s a cultural front.

And it does seem like the larger challenge is how is the 99% actually going to gain power, actually going to carry through and change the laws and have a real revolution? That’s the real challenge that we need to confront.

CM: You talk about other concepts on protest, for instance you talk about structuralism, that is protest as a natural phenomenon, as you point out was the case with the Arab Spring being about rising food prices caused by climate change. In other words, there’s no need to actually organize protest; protests will naturally, organically happen when the public is confronted with hardship.

We got so many angry emails, Micah, about our interview with Slavoj Žižek back in October. We also got a lot of angry emails before he ever came on, that we shouldn’t have him on This is Hell! We also got angry emails about historian Ian Morris being on to discuss his book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels. Listeners didn’t want Žižek on because his book, Event, kind of embraces this structural approach in that there is something happening in the background until circumstances take place and we have an Event. And Morris says we didn’t become a democracy because we were intellectually evolving, as much as we were reacting to the fuel we were using and the best system for that industrialization is democracy.

Is a structuralist approach bad for an activist’s ego, in that it implies you are reacting not to some injustice but to the fact that you have less money or there has been some technological innovation?

MW: I love that question. There’s basically like four paradigms of activism that we operate under. And the dominant paradigm, the dominant theory is called voluntarism. Voluntarism thinks that human action is the most important determining factor in revolution. Revolutions happen when humans act. It’s a very—it feels great to believe in voluntarism, because it often starts with this idea of “if only everyone would do x, then there would be a revolution.” I get emails all the time, like, “Hey! Hey, I have a great idea. If only everyone would do this idea I have, then we would have a revolution.” That’s the core of voluntarism’s assumptions. And it feels great, because it celebrates human agency.

Voluntarism, Structuralism, Subjectivism and Theurgism: The Four Theories of Revolution

There’s another perspective, which is structuralism. And that’s the idea that revolutions are the result of forces outside of human control. And this is actually really interesting, because there have been these studies that looked at food prices. And it turns out that if the Food Price Index, which is this index of food prices compiled by the UN—if it reaches a certain point, then uprisings seem to be much more likely. And that point coincided with the Arab Spring. And as soon as it dropped below that point, that coincided with the decline of Occupy Wall Street and the global movement. And since that time, the Food Price Index has continued to decline. Now it’s at the lowest level it’s been at for several years. And so at this time it actually seems like possibly the revolution is farther away than ever.

But I actually don’t believe in the structuralist approach either. I think there is another option, which is subjectivist. The idea that if we change our minds, then somehow we also change reality. And then there is a fourth option, which is that revolutions are actually some sort of process outside of human control but non-materialist. They are divine interventions.

I think it’s a mixture of all four of these things, and all four are true. But coming back to the thing about structuralism: the most important insight about structuralism is that—and I think Engels and Marx understood this—if you’re not living in a revolutionary moment, and also if your actions don’t actually create revolution, then it’s actually very liberating, because as an activist you are freed to act in any way that you want. If you have the same chance of having a revolution if you protest in the streets as if you plant a community garden or feed homeless people or create art, and each of those is equally protest, then you just do the one that expresses your inner self the most. And that will be the most revolutionary behavior.

So I think structuralism actually kind of liberates us from the voluntarist assumptions that force people to think that the only way to be a protester is to be an urban militant, which is a faulty notion. Structuralism says, instead, “Hey, look! It’s out of our control anyway! All you have to do is be recognized as protesting, and that can take many forms, so be your best self.”

CM: How much does representative democracy undermine the ability for protest to change the law? Wouldn’t—it would seem like there would be a lot more ability for protest to change the law if we had a direct democracy, because then you would have a direct impact on the people that you’re trying to have a direct impact on.

So how much of an obstacle to the ability of protest to change the law is representative democracy?

MW: If you look at it, I think the defining defeat of democracy happened on February 15th , 2003. On that day, the entire world, millions and millions of people, in every country—if people don’t remember this they need to look it up on the internet, because it’s an amazing example of activism— basically in every country in the world, millions of people went into the streets and protested against the Iraq War. They had one simple demand. If you look at the pictures from the UK, it’s amazing: everyone’s just holding up a sign that says “NO.” No to the war, no to the war.

Everyone in the entire world protested and said "No!" to the Iraq war on the exact same day. But it did not stop the war. No government, no representative democracy listened to the protests. That, I think, was the defeat of our concept of democracy today.

Instead what we need to do is stop thinking that mobilizing the "collective will" will somehow force our representatives to listen, and realize that actually for the last decade or more that is no longer true. We need to base our actions on a whole different kind of conception. And where I see us going now is this idea of a global democracy. I think that there’s a lot of challenges there, too, which how are you going to make decisions as a global democratic movement? How would a social movement that won elections in multiple countries—how would local manifestations differ? How would it make decisions among the people? How would it avoid authoritarianism? All these kinds of questions.

But opening up and solving those questions seems to be the most productive route, rather than maintaining these kind of nostalgic views that somehow, if we can rally the constituents, that elected representatives somehow will listen or cave or bend.

CM: So just a couple more questions for you, Micah. You’ve said how “people don’t protest when they think it doesn’t work. They will if things are seen to be possibly changing.”

How do you prove to prospective and potential protesters that your protest, this one, will actually cause change, this time?

MW: That’s a really good question. People don’t vote for the strongest horse, they vote for the horse they think is going to win. And I think that’s really a little bit where the mystery of social movements comes in. People have an intuitive sense of what might be an effective moment to join a protest. I think before a protest—before Occupy started, people were not able to recognize it as being something that would be successful. The media ignored us. The many people I told the idea to beforehand dismissed it. Only 200 people showed up to the organizing meetings in New York City, for example, if you think about how large the activist community is in New York—the idea was shunned by the traditional activist community.

So before an event happens, people don’t really know if it’s going to be success or not. But as it unfolds, they seem to have a kind of intuitive sense of, “Wow, this is really going in an interesting direction.” I think a lot of activism pretends as if people have no memory. It pretends as if the only protesters are 20-year-olds who have never seen a movement before. Anyone who’s older, 30, 40, or 50 years old now, has seen multiple protests and has seen multiple social movements, and has a sense of which ones follow a pattern and which one is really breaking out and going a different direction.

So it is a really interesting challenge to think about. What is it that makes people suddenly believe in a social movement? What was that moment that made people suddenly believe in Occupy Wall Street? And for Occupy, it seemed to be triggered by accident. The first accident that woke people up was when some women were pepper sprayed about a week after Occupy started. That got John Stewart’s attention and was broadcast over the news, and all of a sudden people were like, “Whoa, this is kind of strange what’s happening there.”

And the second event that woke up the entire world was when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the largest nonviolent civil disobedience arrest in American history since the Civil Rights era. So when those 700 people were methodically arrested while being peaceful, that suddenly woke people up. They suddenly realized, “Wow, I have not seen 700 people be arrested in this country in a nonviolently militant way like that, since the Civil Rights era. This is really something special.”

And within 24 hours, I remember, there were a thousand encampments around the world within 24 hours after that event. And that’s when all the traditional activist organizations in New York also joined and started to pretend as if they had been there from the beginning and all that kind of game.

But I think it’s about that kind of giving people that sense that, wow, this is really something different. This is really something magical that could really change things.

CM: Micah, I’ve got one last question for you. We do this with all of our guests: it’s the Question from Hell, the question we hate to ask, you might hate to answer, or our audience is going to hate your response. You say how the most common understanding of activism is that you’re trying to cause change. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the right—Sarah Palin, FOX News—they were making fun of the term “community activist” as it was applied to Barack Obama. That said, by 2010 FOX News and the right are embracing the Tea Party, which they argue is a grassroots movement (of course never using the words “community activism,” although it did cause change).

Was the Tea Party a more effective social movement than Occupy Wall Street? And if so, what can the left learn from the right when it comes to social change?

MW: You’re throwing me in hot water here. I believe—and I advocated at the very beginning of Occupy Wall Street—that Occupy should have teamed up with the Tea Party. I believe that the 99% is neither 100% left nor 100% right, and that the kind of leftist factionalism that refuses to even create a coalition with the right is one of the things that’s holding us back.

So whether or not the Tea Party was more effective than Occupy, I think it just represents different organizing styles. I think at the beginning the Tea Party was a legitimate movement that became coopted by corporate forces. Occupy in the beginning was a legitimate movement that also, less successfully, was co-opted by institutional activist forces. And what’s really going on here is that there are millions of people all over the world, billions of people, who are demanding change and waking up, and I think that we overemphasize whether or not they—we overemphasize how they express that dissent, and then we judge them. Are they using the words of the left or the words of the right?

I believe that a global coalition will always need to be some sort of blend of left and right, and that’s probably one of the least popular opinions on the left right now.

CM: Micah, I really appreciate you being on the show this week. Really a fantastic conversation. I’m looking forward to your book coming out, and I will bug you like crazy to have you back on the show in March when it does come out. I’m hoping that you will put out some more stuff between now and then so we can have you back on! Biggest mistake you ever made was giving me your email address.

I dream of a hybrid movement-party that wins elections in multiple countries.

The Crisis Within Activism is a Crisis Within Democracy

“We are living through a period with the largest protests in human history. But they are not working. And when you reach that point, instead of repeating the traditional protest behaviors, screaming and holding posters, you have to innovate,” says Micah White, cofounder of Boutique Activist Consultancy and cocreator of Occupy Wall Street, in an interview with Brazil's CartaCapital about his book, THE END OF PROTEST.

CartaCapital: Is there a crisis in today's representative democracies?

Micah White: Absolutely. In addition to a crisis in representative democracy, there is a crisis in the model of activism, how people protest. There is a crisis in the power of people to force governments to do what they want. We live in a time when there appears to be no way for ordinary people to influence their governments through protest… This means there is no democracy.

CC: Does this mean that the democratic system does not work anymore?

MW: I do not think in any way that the dream of democracy is dead. The dream of democracy has been going on since the beginning of civilization and humans have always been fighting for democracy. For five thousand years we’ve been overthrowing pharaohs, kings and tyrants in a struggle for democracy. Now we're in one of those moments in history when we have a low point of democracy, but there will be a high point of democracy soon. This requires, however, a kind of innovation within our concepts of activism.

CC: How is it possible to reduce the power of corporations in government?

MW: The only way to remove the power of corporations in our society would be to create a social movement capable of winning elections in multiple countries to carry out a unified agenda. As movements and as activists, we have avoided the only solution, which is: we have to build social movements that can also function as political parties. This is a need that we do not want to hear. We think we can just organize large protests and get really angry. Occupy Wall Street was a once in a lifetime event and it did not work because we were chasing a false theory of how social change happens. We believe, or wanted to believe, that a large number of people going to the streets can cause changes in their governments, but when we achieved a historical social movement, we realized this story of change is not true. Now it is clear that the only way to win power is to create a hybrid between a social movement and a political party. Something that does not have leaders, but has spokespeople and an organizational structure that lasts more than six months.

CC: How is it possible to achieve social change through protests?

MW: Today, social movements ask their participants do very basic and small actions: to take to the streets, holding posters and shouting. These are very basic behaviors and no longer have a political effect. Occupy Wall Street and the 15M in Spain, brought more complex behaviors, such as participating in general assemblies or utilizing hand gestures, but these are still very simple behaviors. I think we have to ask more of social movement participants. We must show that social movements require difficult behaviors like, winning elections, drafting legislation, governing our cities ... We need to demand a greater investment than just show up. The Internet allows us to ask for more. Thanks to social networks, it's time to treat participants as capable of developing sophisticated behaviors and teach each other how to to spread these actions globally.

CC: Do social networks have a new role in organizing and promoting protests?

MW: Absolutely. I think the role of the Internet is spreading contagious emotions. If we look at the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, it seems that the trigger was a mood that spread all over the world and was basically a sensation of losing one’s fear. People said "I do not care about the risks, this is the time to act” and went to the streets. That's what social networks do: they allow us to transfer that contagious mood of rebellion to the whole world. The other power of the Internet is in allowing us to innovate our tactics in real time. From the moment when a new tactic emerges in one city, it can be deployed in another city. So it was with Occupy Wall Street.

CC: Can the internet become something more than a network in which feelings are spread?

MW: There is a hope that perhaps the Internet allows us an electronic democracy. That's the idea of the 5 Star Movement in Italy. Participants use the internet to decide on legislation and to select candidates for the elections. The idea of the Internet enabling collective decision-making is very interesting, but difficult to achieve.

CC: Some people prefer digital activism to the street. What do you think?

MW: In the early stages, the Internet is very important for social movements. However, over time, the Internet becomes harmful because things start to look better online than in real life. This happened with Occupy. The protest looked better on Facebook than it did in the streets. This is negative because people start to prefer the online experience to the real world. So the Internet is a double-edged sword. The internet is a weapon that is not fully under our control, and it is very difficult to wield effectively.

CC: Do you believe that the advance of neoliberalism has helped reduce the importance of social movements around the world?

MW: Protests are a form of war and war is politics by other means. Protests are ways of influencing the political system by unconventional methods. And the revolution is a change in the legal regime. It is transforming what is legal into something illegal or making what is illegal legal. If social movements are a form of warfare then it is clear that the forces that are in power will use all possible means to destroy social movements. The problem is activists do not see their protests in the context of war. We see them as a big party or something, while the other side realizes the importance of the event. Above all, however, it is crucial not blame others. We must blame ourselves. Social movements do not fail because the police are very strong. Throughout history, people have overthrown governments with a much stronger police, either because they found a way to defeat them in the streets or because they managed to get the police to change sides. So when our protests fail it is because our theory of change was wrong and not because the other side was stronger.

CC: Occupy Wall Street was born in 2011 and influenced many movements around the world. To date, we have several social movements emerging in Europe also influenced by 15M or Occupy. What is the role of the internet?

MW: What happened is that a new tactic emerged and it worked, so it spread worldwide. Occupy Wall Street combined tactics in Egypt with those of Spain and applied them to the United States. The police could not anticipate this new protest strategy and that's why the movement worked. Once the police discovered how to respond to our encampments, they destroyed all the movements worldwide in the same way. Protest is a constant war of new attack strategies and counter-attack. Interestingly, at the moment we are increasing the frequency of protests. This is very good, but on the other hand, we must be skeptical because we are living through a period with the largest protests in human history, but they are not working.

CC: Do you believe that we can be in a historic moment of rupture?

MW: What I imagine is the birth of a social movement that wins elections in a country and then begins to win elections in multiple countries. Then you will see Syriza or the 5 Star Movement in three, seven or ten different countries. Yeah ... I really think it's about this storyline of a global social movement.

CC: You do not think that is too optimistic?

MW: I think we live in a time when activists are so focused on what seems possible that we do not achieve anything. We need to disturb the power and not act only in safe ways. That's what Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring did. The best activism is the one that does the things we fear.

Advice for the next generation of social movements: “Never protest the same way twice.”

“Protest is Broken.”

Attracting millions of people to the streets no longer guarantees the success of a protest, says Micah White, 33, the cocreator of Occupy Wall Street.

“Occupy was a perfect example of a social movement that should have worked according to the dominant theories of protest and activism. And yet, it failed,” says Micah in an interview with Folha de São Paulo, the largest daily newspaper in Brazil.

Micah White argues that the use of violence in protests is effective, but only in the short term. And he argues that learning to use social networks to benefit social movements is one of the greatest challenges of activism. “The biggest risk is becoming spectators of our own protests” he says.

Living in a rural community on the Oregon coast, with about 300 inhabitants, Micah, and his wife Chiara Ricciardone, now run Boutique Activist Consultancy, an activism think tank specializing in impossible campaigns.

Micah was in São Paulo, Brazil on May 26th to participate in the launch event of GUME (“Knife Edge”), an engagement agency founded by Regina Augusto.

Folha de São Paulo: How would you analyze Occupy Wall Street today? What went wrong?

Micah White: This is the big question and of course I've been thinking about it since the end of Occupy. For me, the Occupy movement was a “constructive failure,” which basically means it was a failure that taught us something about activism.

The real benefit of Occupy Wall Street is that it taught us the contemporary ideas and assumptions we have about protests are false. Occupy was a perfect example of how social movements should work. It accorded with the dominant theories of protest and activism: it was a historical event, joined millions of people across demographics from around the world around a series of demands, there was little violence. And yet, the movement failed. So my main conclusion is that activism has been based on a series of false assumptions about what kind of collective behavior creates social change.

F: What are these assumptions?

MW: First, the central idea of contemporary activism: urban protests, with large numbers of people in the streets, primarily secular, and that revolve around a unified demand. The idea is basically, “Look, if we get a million or ten million or a hundred million people in the streets, finally our demands will be met.” However, if you look at the last ten, fifteen years, we have had the biggest demonstrations in history. And the protests continue to grow in size and frequency, and yet they have not resulted in political change.

F: Now what?

MW: What we learned from Occupy, and also with the Arab Spring, is that revolutions happen when people lose their fear. So I think the main trigger for the next revolutionary movement will be a contagious mood that spreads throughout the world and the human community.

For me, the main thing we need to see is activists abandoning a materialistic explanation of revolution—the idea that we need to put people in the streets—and starting to think about how to spread that kind of mood, how to make people see the world in fundamentally different way. That's about it. The future of activism is not about pressing our politicians through synchronized public spectacles.

F: It's not about pressuring politicians?

MW: No. I think the standard forms of protest have become part of the standard pattern. It’s like they are expected. And the key is to constantly innovate the way we protest because otherwise it is as if protest is part of the script. It is now expected to have people in the streets, and these crowds will behave in a certain way, and then the police will come and some of the people will be beaten up and arrested. Then the rest will go home. Our participation in this script is based on the false story that the more people you have in the streets the higher your chances of getting social change.

F: Can you explain better what you're proposing?

MW: What I am proposing is a type of activism that focuses on creating a mental shift in people. Basically an epiphany. In concrete terms, I think there is much potential in the creation of hybrid social movement-political parties that require more complex behaviors of people like running for political office, seeking votes, participating in the city administration.

F: The use of social networks is quite controversial among contemporary activists. Some say it is a key tool to increase the reach of the protests, others say it exposes the movement to monitoring by the authorities. What's your opinion?

MW: This is one of the key challenges. Social media is one of the tools that activists have, and we need to use it in some way. But in fact, social media has a negative side, which goes beyond police monitoring.

During Occupy, we experienced it: things started to look better on social networks than in real life. Then people started to focus on social media and to feel more comfortable posting on Twitter and Facebook than going to an Occupy event. This to me is the biggest risk: to become spectators of our own protests.

F: What do you think of the Black Lives Matter protests that are happening in the United States since last year, the result of racial tension in the country?

MW: Of course I fully support this movement. I am black, I have experienced the discrimination that they are protesting. But thinking strategically, I believe it is very important never to protest directly against the police. Because the police are actually made to absorb protest—the objective of the police is to dissipate your energy in protesting them so you'll let alone the most sensitive parts of the repressive regime in which we live: politicians and big corporations. We must protest more deeply.

F: What do you think of the use of violence in protests?

MW: Studies suggest that protesters who use violence are more effective than those that do not. I think violence is effective, but only in the short term, because you end up developing a kind of organized structure that is easy for police to infiltrate. In the long run, it is much better to develop nonviolent tactics that allow you to create a stable and lasting social movement.

F: But doesn’t violence exclude the public from the movement?

MW: People become alienated and become frightened when they see the black bloc tactic because they do not understand and can not imagine doing it. And movements work when they inspire people, when they are positive, affirmative and make people lose their fear.

It's a difficult balance, because you also do not want to be on the other side and only support forms of activism that are tepid and tedious—you have to find a middle ground that excites people and also leaves them with a little fear. No one really has a remedy to resolve the issue.

F: Your book THE END OF PROTEST decrees the end of the protest as we know it. Can we reinvent protest?

MW: Protest is reinvented all the time. Every generation experiences its own moments of revolution. The main thing is that we are now living through a time when tactical innovations are happening much more often because people can see what others are doing around the world and innovate in real time.

I think the future of revolution starts with people promising themselves that they will never protest the same way twice. This is very difficult for activists because they like to follow patterns. But when we are committed to innovation, we will invent totally new forms of protest. People did not expect to see something like Occupy when it emerged. And now we do not expect the next big movement... but it will come.